The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  He almost decided to tell the chief to trash this keyboard, then changed his mind. The chief had cut him a lot of slack these past three weeks: he should try to prove to the chief that he could still carry his share of the load. He put more WD-40 on the keyboard and reattacked the sticky mess with the toothbrush.

  Terry Franklin’s last meal was a hot dog with mustard, catsup and relish, a small order of fries and a medium Sprite. He ate it with another sailor from his section in the main cafeteria. They discussed the new secretary in the division office—was she really a blonde, would she or wouldn’t she, was it worth trying to find out, and so on.

  The afternoon went quickly. The chief sent him with one other man to work on a balky tape drive in the enlisted manpower section, and the afternoon flew by. They had found the problem but had not yet repaired it when quitting time rolled around.

  So he carried his tools back to the shop and exchanged guffaws with his shipmates, then walked to the bus stop outside and found a place in the usual line.

  Had he known what was coming, one wonders what he would have done differently. No doubt a larger man who knew the end was nigh might have lived his last day pretty much as he had all his others, but Terry Franklin was not a big man in any sense of the word, and he had come to realize that in the last three weeks, since the fiasco of the bungled drop. He knew he was a coward, a weakling without backbone or character, but, he thought, only he knew, and so what? Superman lives in Metropolis and Batman lives in Gotham. The rest of us just try to get along.

  Yet, given who he was and what he was, should he have known he might be approaching the end of his string? The signs were certainly there if he had thought it through dispassionately, with some detachment. He didn’t, of course.

  He used most of his last hour on earth to stare out the bus window and think about the feel of the sun on his back and sand between his bare toes, and to daydream of a hard young female body under him mingling her sweat with his. She didn’t have a face, this girl in his dreams, but she had firm brown tits and a flat stomach and long brown legs with taut thighs.

  When he turned the key in the car ignition the radio boomed to life as the engine caught. “…like a bat outta hell, ba-dupe, ba-dupey…”

  He rolled the window down and fastened his seat belt and patted the steering wheel with his hands in time to the music.

  The car in front of him turned right after four blocks, and the one behind turned left a block later. Terry Franklin paid no attention. He drove out onto an old boulevard now lined with small strip businesses and proceeded about a mile before he swung the car onto a side street. He liked to drive through these quiet residential streets because they had so little traffic and he thought he made better time, though he had never clocked it.

  At the first stop sign he came to, a little girl was crossing the street pushing a miniature baby carriage containing her doll. That she had chosen to cross the street at just this time and place probably gave Terry Franklin another minute of life.

  One minute was just about the time it took for him to wait until the little girl was clear, depress the accelerator and cruise down to the next cross street. He glanced both ways, no traffic, and took his foot off the brake to roll on through. “…like a bat outta hell…”

  That’s when the bomb underneath the vehicle, directly under the driver’s seat, exploded.

  Terry Franklin felt a concussive impact as his knees came up to smash into his chin, but that was the only sensation that he was conscious of in the thousandth of a second he had left to live. The floor of the car came apart and the seat springs and fabric and padding were all forced explosively upward. His skull popped like a ripe melon when this rising, accelerating column on which he sat smashed into the roof of the car and bowed it upward. The windows exploded outward as the fireball continued to expand, showering the area with glass. Fragments of springs and plastic and fabric were forced deep into Terry Franklin’s now lifeless corpse, which began to sear from the intense heat.

  The car, still in gear and torn almost in two, moved like a wounded crab diagonally across the intersection and lightly impacted a parked vehicle. Then the engine quit from fuel starvation. The severed fuel line dumped its liquid into the molten mess in the center of the vehicle and the smoldering wreckage became an inferno. In ten seconds the fire was so hot the fuel tank exploded.

  Coming around the corner four blocks away, FBI agent Clarence Brown saw the rising fireball from the exploding gas tank. He grabbed the dash-mounted mike. “Holy shit, his car blew up. It blew up! The subject’s car blew up!”

  The voice on the telephone had a hollow, metallic sound, like it was coming through a long pipe. “Little development I thought you would want to know about, Luis. Probably nothing important. Terry Franklin just went out with a bang. His car blew up.”

  “Anybody else hurt, Dreyfus?”

  “Not another soul. We had an agent following him, keeping tabs per your instructions, and he saw the gas tank go poof. The lab guys are on the way. The agent at the scene, Brown, says it looks like a bomb.”

  “What time, exactly?”

  “Sixteen fifty-seven.”

  Camacho looked at his watch. Seventeen minutes ago. “Get a search warrant for his house.”

  “Already doing the affidavit.”

  “Send a man over to the house to watch it. And you’d better alert somebody out in California that they’ll have to do a next-of-kin notification when we get a positive ID from the medical examiner.”

  “The ID’s gonna take a while. The corpse is still in the car, roasted like a Christmas turkey.”

  “Have the people in California quietly check to see that his wife and in-laws are physically there.”

  “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you?”

  “I just follow orders, asshole,” Camacho snarled. “Why don’t you do the same?” He slammed the phone onto its cradle.

  Two minutes later it rang again. “Yes.”

  “Dreyfus again. Already we’re getting calls from TV stations. There’s a chopper overhead now. It’s real visual with the smoke column and all. Evening news for sure, distraught housewives and sobbing kids, the whole bit. What’s the official hot screaming poop?”

  “We’re investigating, cooperating with the local police. Off the record, hint at drugs.”

  “Roger hint.”

  “Is local law on the scene?”

  “Yeah. Couple cruisers and a big red fire truck.”

  “Don’t let ’em touch anything.”

  “Roger Wilco, over and out.”

  Luis Camacho pulled into his driveway at five minutes after midnight and checked the jury-rigged bulb in the hole in the door panel. Still off. Amen.

  The night air retained some of the heat from the day. The FBI agent stood in his shirt sleeves beside his car and breathed the deep, rich scent of the earth.

  The neighborhood was quiet. He could hear crickets.

  All the lights were off in Harlan Albright’s house. Only a gleam of the hall light was visible through the window of his own door. Camacho picked up the package on his front seat and locked his car, then used his key on the front door. He shot the bolt behind him.

  There was a note by the phone. Albright had called.

  Camacho poured himself a bourbon and added three ice cubes from the tray in the freezer. He opened the kitchen door and stood there sipping his drink and looking at the shadows in the backyard. The dog whined and wagged its tail.

  Taking his time, Camacho strolled the length of the yard and seated himself in the tire swing hanging from the old oak. He absently petted the dog and made comforting noises as he sipped the liquor and let the alcohol take effect.

  It would be interesting to see how many of those servos were still in Albright’s mad bomber kit. And the batteries and fuses.

  You sure had to take your hat off to Peter Aleksandrovich, a.k.a. good ol’ Harlan. Terry Franklin’s sudden end had been a nice tidy job. No loose ends. N
o secondary casualties that might fester into an eventual murder indictment that would make a spy swap impossible, should the worst happen and he get arrested by the FBI. Terry Franklin had been very neatly and permanently silenced. Scratch one asset-turned-debit. Clean up that balance sheet. Wipe off the red ink, and, Voilà! we have a profitable enterprise, as anyone can plainly see.

  Good ol’ Harlan’s house was as dark as a tomb. The big maples in front shielded it from the streetlights and the oaks and beeches here in back performed a similar service with that little alley light. So the house was just a looming black shape.

  Camacho thought about the stairs up to the bedroom, pictured himself once again slipping up there, careful as a mouse, looking for booby traps, prying open the trapdoor to the attic—he shivered as he thought about it. Good ol’ Harlan would probably rig some more unpleasant surprises, like plastique that goes boom when the someone coming into a room steps in the wrong place, or forgets to turn the light on and off three times in three seconds. Good ol’ Harlan would be just the man for a little rig like that.

  Wonder if Harlan’s found the blank film in the camera? Had Camacho been careful enough with the operation? Had he tripped a camera he didn’t find? If so, that bulb in the door would come on very soon.

  His fatigue hit him all at once. It was all he could do to walk back to the house, lock the door, and ascend the stairs. He stripped off his clothes and fell into bed.

  “I don’t want to ever get married,” Rita said.

  “Me neither,” Toad Tarkington agreed fervently. “Half the marriages fail, kids in single-parent households, everybody broke—who needs it?” It was a pretty Saturday morning and they were on their way to a restaurant for breakfast, with Toad at the wheel.

  “People should be free to have a relationship without being bound,” she said.

  “When two people break up they shouldn’t have to hire lawyers to fight over the dog.”

  “Marriage is an obsolete institution.”

  “It’s doomed,” Toad pronounced, sounding a good bit like Samuel Dodgers denouncing sin, which was probably unintentional. But to prove he wasn’t a bigot he added, “Of course, my parents are happily married. Thirty-five years this July. It’s a lot tougher nowadays, though. My sister was only married three years, one kid—the divorce was real messy. My dad had to help her with the legal fees.”

  “Did she get custody?” Rita asked.

  Toad told her about it. Both of them shook their heads sadly. Truly, modern marriage was a misery.

  “Two people who love each other don’t need all that,” Rita sniffed. “I want a man who loves me and wants to be with me, not because he has to, but because he wants to.”

  “It’s the has-to part that turns me off,” Toad explained. “You know, I think it’s terrific that you and I think so much alike.”

  “Well, we’re very similar. We both have middle-class backgrounds, good educations, we’re naval officers, we fly. You’re only a year older than I am. It’s no wonder.”

  “I guess.”

  Toad wheeled her Mazda into the restaurant parking lot and found a space. He opened the door for Rita and she smiled her thanks, a gorgeous little grin that he returned. She rested her fingers lightly on his arm as they walked across the macadam. He held the door for her and she preceded him through. He had never felt better in his life—so alive, so into all of it. They loved each other without strings. And the best part, he told himself, was that they could be so forthright, so frank with each other. Wouldn’t the world be a better place if everyone’s relationships were so open and honest?

  They were married that afternoon in Oakland, Maryland.

  The glider wheeled and soared six feet above the dune, the sun flashing on its wings. Jake Grafton sat in the sand with the wind at his back. David and Amy sat beside him, hugging their knees. He manipulated the levers on the radio control box without taking his eyes from the free-flying bird.

  “Remember to keep the nose up in the turns,” David reminded him as the glider reached the tuft of sea grass a hundred feet north along the dune where Jake had been turning. He had the technique now, he hoped. He hadn’t crashed in ten minutes. He thought he could stay aloft as long as the wind remained steady.

  Back the glider came, crossing silently above their heads. “Totally awesome,” David murmured.

  “Awesome” seemed to be the word this year in the sixth grade.

  What had it been when Jake had been twelve years old? He tried to remember and drew a blank.

  Amy Carol stretched out in the sand on her stomach, her chin on her forearms. Her figure was still a collection of straight lines. Callie said she would start to fill out soon. David matched her position, his big feet incongruous beside Amy’s petite ones. No doubt his growth would also spurt in the next year or so; he already had the feet of a good-sized man, though the rest of him had a lot further to go.

  “Your dad’s gonna be a pretty good pilot,” David told her.

  “He isn’t my dad. He’s Jake.”

  “He’s gonna be good,” David insisted.

  “That’s not so tough to do,” she said, sitting up.

  “Oh no? Why don’t you try it.”

  “Can I, Jake?”

  “Yeah. Come over here and watch me for a minute.” He explained the controls and demonstrated how they worked. After two passes up and down the beach with Amy watching intently, he turned the box over to her. She overbanked and nosed the plane in on the very next turn.

  David smacked his hands together in exasperation. “‘Nothing to it.’ Girls!” He pronounced the last word as if it were spelled “gurls.”

  The left wing had torn skin and a broken spar. The three aviators collected their gear and trudged for the house. “Don’t worry, Cap’n,” the boy said with a disgusted glance at Amy, “I can fix it good as new.”

  “I’m sure you can,” Jake told him, grinning.

  “Girls don’t know nothin’ about flyin’.”

  “Don’t bet on it, Dave. There’s a woman pilot working for me, and she’s real darn good.”

  Amy squared her shoulders, threw her head back and marched proudly before them, at long last assuming her rightful place among the exalted sisters.

  “You’re what?” exclaimed Harriet, Rita’s horrified roommate. It was Sunday evening and they were in the bedroom. Out in the living room Toad had settled in to watch a Knicks game.

  Rita held up her left hand and waggled it proudly. “Here’s the ring. I’m married.”

  “My God! How long have you known him? A month? How long were you engaged?”

  “A little over an hour. We were driving to Deep Creek Lake for the weekend and around Frostburg we decided to get married. So Toad drove off the next exit and into Oakland. We found the most delightful minister. He knew a lady in the county clerk’s office—she was a member of his church—and she drove downtown and opened up the courthouse just to issue us a license. Wasn’t that sweet?”

  Harriet lowered herself onto the bed and covered her face with her hands.

  “The minister’s wife gave me some flowers from her garden. Some paper-white narcissus and tulips and multicolored butterfly daffodils, all accented by bridalwreath in a beautiful bouquet. I cradled them in my right arm when we said our vows.” She sighed, remembering. “I have the best ones down in the car. I thought you and I could press them.”

  “A one-hour engagement! Rita, Rita, Rita, you poor poor child. What do you know about this man? What?” Harriet opened the bedroom door a crack and looked with loathing at the groom sagged out in front of the TV with a beer in his hand. No wonder they called him Toad.

  “My God, Rita, how could you?” she hissed. “What do you know about him? He could be AC-DC or a closet pervert, or even a Republican! What will your mother say?” Harriet spun like a lioness ready to pounce. “Have you told her yet?”

  “Wellll—”

  “I knew it! When are you going to tell her? After all, Rita, she is your
mother. She once told me that after buying a thousand wedding presents for all of your friends, she was so looking forward to inviting every one of them to your wedding. You’re her only daughter!” Harriet threw herself backward onto her bed and bounced once. “How could you?” she moaned.

  “It was easy,” Rita Moravia Tarkington said lightly. She dearly enjoyed Harriet’s tantrums. “It was so romantic. Just like I always wanted it to be. He’s so handsome, so…We’re going to be so very happy all our lives. He’s…he’s…” She sighed again and smiled.

  “One thing’s for sure,” Harriet said acidly, “he’s all yours now.”

  On Monday morning Lieutenant Toad Tarkington and Lieutenant Rita Moravia entered Jake’s office together, side by side. They stopped in front of his desk and waited at parade rest until he looked up from the report he was working on.

  “Yeah.”

  “We have some news for you, Captain,” Rita said.

  Jake carefully surveyed their expectant faces. He scowled. “Why have I got the feeling I’m not going to enjoy this?”

  Rita and Toad both grinned broadly and glanced at each other. “We’re married,” Toad said.

  Jake Grafton clapped his hands over his ears. “I didn’t hear that. Whatever it was, I didn’t hear it. And I don’t want to hear it.” He stood and leaned slightly toward them, his voice low: “I have enough problems around here without people sniping at me about the romantic status of my test crew. What you two do on your own time is your business. But until we get the prototype testing completed and I submit the report, you two puppies are going to walk the line for me. All business. No kissy-facey or kootchy-koo or groping or any of that other goofy hooey. No glorious announcements. Strictly business.”

  “Yes, sir,” Rita said.