The Minotaur

by Stephen Coonts

  This maneuver was designed to allow Rita to explore the limits of G and maneuverability at ever-changing airspeeds. Toad felt the nibble of the stall buffet, and for the first time felt the wings rock sloppily, almost as if Rita were fighting to control their position.

  “I’m having some troub—” she said, but before she could complete the thought the plane departed.

  The down wing quit flying and the upper wing flopped them over inverted. The plane began to gyrate wildly. Positive Gs mashed them for half a second, then negative Gs threw them up against their harness straps, but since the airplane was inverted, it was upward toward the earth. The airplane spun like a lopsided Frisbee, bucking up and down madly as the Gs slammed them, positive, negative, positive, negative. The ride was so violent Toad couldn’t read the MFDs on the panel before him.

  “Inverted spin,” he gasped over the ICS.

  “The controls—it won’t—” Rita sounded exasperated.

  “You’re in an inverted spin,” Toad heard a hard, calm male voice say. Smoke Judy on the radio.

  “I’m—the controls—”

  “Twenty-nine thousand…twenty-eight…” By a supreme effort of will Toad made himself concentrate on the altimeter and read the spinning needles.

  “Spin assist,” he reminded her. This switch would allow the horizontal stabilator its full travel, not restricted by its high-speed limited throw. The danger was if the pilot pulled too hard at high speed without the mechanical limit, the tail might be ripped away. Right now Rita needed all the help she could get to pull the nose down.

  “It’s on.”

  “Twenty-five thousand.” He was having trouble staying conscious. The ride was vicious, violent beyond description. His vision closed in until he was looking through a pipe. He knew the signs. He was passing out. “Twenty-two,” he croaked.

  Miraculously the violent pitching action of the nose decreased and he felt as if he were being thrown sideways. As the G decreased, his vision came back. Rita had them out of the spin and diving. She had the power back, about 80 percent or so. She rolled the plane upright and the G came on steadily as she pulled to get them out of their rocketing dive. “Okay,” she whispered, “okay, baby, come to Mama.”

  The wings started rocking again as the G increased, and Toad opened his mouth to shout a warning. Too late. The right wing slammed down and the plane rolled inverted again. “Spin,” was all he could get out.

  He fought the slamming up and down. “Seventeen thousand…”

  “Rita, you’d better eject.” The hard, fast voice of Smoke Judy.

  “I’ve got it,” Rita shouted on the radio. “Stay with me.” That was for Toad. She had the nose coming steadily down now, that yawning sensation again as she fed in full rudder.

  “Fifteen grand,” Toad advised.

  They were running out of sky.

  “It’s the controls! I’ve—”

  “Thirteen!”

  She was out of the spin now, upright, but the nose was still way low, seventy degrees below the horizon. Power at idle, she deployed the speed brakes and began to cautiously lift the nose.

  “Eleven thousand.”

  “Come on, baby.”

  “Ten.”

  The ground was horribly close. Their speed was rapidly building, even with the boards out and engines at idle. The ground elevation here was at least four thousand feet above sea level, so they were within six thousand feet of the ground, now five, still forty degrees nose down. They would make it. Rita added another pound of back pressure to the stick.

  The left wing snapped down.

  Toad pulled the ejection handle.

  The windblast hit him like the fist of God. He was tumbling, then he wasn’t, now hurling toward the earth—an earth so close he could plainly see every rock and bush—and cursing himself for the fool that he was for waiting so long. Lazily, slowly, as if time didn’t matter, the seat kicked him loose with a thump.

  The ground was right there, racing up at him. He closed his eyes.

  He was going to die now. So this is how it feels…

  A tremendous shock snapped through him, almost ripping his boots off. The opening shock of the parachute canopy.

  The ground was right there! He swung for another few seconds, then smashed into a thicket of brush. Too late he remembered he should have protected his head. He came to rest in the middle of an opaque dust cloud.

  He was conscious through it all. He wiggled his limbs experimentally. Still in one piece, thank the Lord!

  Rita! Where was Rita?

  He was standing before the dust had cleared, ripping his helmet off and trying to see. He tore at his Koch fittings. There! Rid of the chute.

  Striding out of the brush, almost falling, looking.

  Another dust cloud. Several hundred yards away and down the hill slightly. Something had impacted there. Rita? But there was no chute visible.

  Mother of God!

  He began to run.

  23

  You still here?” the doctor asked when he saw Toad leaning against the counter at the nurses’ station. The doctor was about forty and clad in a loose green hospital garment with tennis shoes on his feet.

  “How is she?”

  “Unconscious.” The doctor swabbed the perspiration from his forehead with his sleeve. “I don’t know when she’ll come around. I don’t know if she ever will.”

  “What’s wrong with her?” Toad demanded, grasping the doctor by the arm.

  “Everything.” He patiently pried Toad’s hand loose. “Her spleen exploded. Fractured skull with severe concussion. Blood in her urine—kidney damage. Broken ribs, busted collarbone, two fractured vertebrae. That’s just the stuff we know about. We’re still looking.”

  “She hit the ground before her parachute opened,” Toad explained. “The drag chute was out and the main chute must have been partially deployed. She just needed another hundred feet or so.”

  “Her status is extremely unstable.” The doctor took out a pack of cigarettes and lit one. “I don’t know how she’s made it this long.” He flipped the ash on the floor, right in front of the No Smoking sign. “The average person wouldn’t have made it to the hospital. But she’s young and she’s in great shape, good strong heart. Perhaps, just perhaps…” He took a deep drag and exhaled the smoke through his nose, savoring it.

  “Is she gonna be able to fly again?” Toad wanted to know.

  The doctor took a small portable ashtray from his pocket and stubbed out the cigarette in it after a couple more deep drags. He looked Toad over carefully before he spoke. “I don’t think you heard what I said. She’ll be lucky if she lives. Walking out of this hospital will be a miracle. There’s nothing you can do for her. Now why don’t you go back to the Q and take one of those sleeping pills the nurse gave you. You need to get some rest.”

  The doctor turned away from Toad and leaned his elbows on the counter of the nurses’ station. “When you get Lieutenant Moravia’s emergency data sheet from the navy, let me know. We’ll have to notify her next of kin. They may want to fly out here to be with her.”

  Toad smacked the waist-high counter with his hand. “I am her next of kin. She’s my wife.”

  “Oh,” he said, looking Toad over again, then rubbing the back of his neck. “Sorry. I didn’t know that.”

  “I want to be in the room with her. I’ll sit in the chair.”

  The doctor opened his mouth, closed it and glanced at the nurses, then shrugged. “Sure, Lieutenant. Okay. Why not?”

  Thirty minutes later Jake Grafton stuck his head into the room. He looked at Rita, the two nurses, the doctor, the IV drips and the heart monitor, then motioned to Toad, who followed him out into the hall.

  “How is she?”

  “She’s in a deep coma. She may die.” Tarkington repeated what the doctor had told him.

  Jake Grafton listened carefully, his face expressionless. When Toad finally ran down, he said, “C’mon. Let’s go find a place to sit.” The
y ended up in the staff lounge in plastic chairs at the only table, between a microwave oven and a pop machine. “What happened out there today?”

  Toad’s recapitulation of the flight took thirty minutes. After he had heard it all, from takeoff to loading Rita into the meat wagon, Jake had questions, lots of them.

  They had been talking for over an hour when a young enlisted man opened the door and stuck his head in. “Captain Grafton? There’s an Admiral Dunedin on the phone for you.”

  “Tell him I’ll be right there.”

  On the way down the hall he told Toad, “You go check on Rita. I’ll see you in a bit.”

  The phone was in the duty officer’s office. Jake held it to his ear as the air force officer, a woman, closed the door on her way out. “This is Captain Grafton, sir.”

  “Admiral Dunedin, Jake. We got your message about the crash. How’s Moravia?”

  “In a coma. It’s an open question whether she’ll pull through. She ejected too low and her chute didn’t fully open before she hit the ground. She’s got a fractured skull, damaged spleen and a variety of other problems. Five or six bones broken.”

  “And Tarkington?”

  “Not a scratch.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, sir, the way it looks right now, the fly-by-wire system is suspect. We were having troubles with the control inputs—they were too much at low speeds—so we went with new E-PROMs. Now, all those parameters are supposed to be trouble-shot and double-checked on the bench test equipment and all that, but something went wrong somewhere. The plane got away from Rita in a high-G maneuver and went into an inverted spin. She recovered, then it departed again when she pulled G on the pullout. Coming out of the second spin, she just ran out of sky. It flipped on the pullout and Toad punched.

  “Hindsight and all, they should have ejected on the second departure, but…They were trying to save the plane. Now it looks like Toad may have punched too late for Rita.”

  “How’s Tarkington taking it?”

  “Blaming himself. I might as well tell you, if you didn’t know, they’re married.”

  There was a pregnant silence. “I didn’t know.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Did that have any bearing on this accident?”

  “Not that I can see. They stayed with the plane because it was a prototype and they were trying to save it. Rita thought she could save it all the way down. The last departure at five thousand feet above the ground made it a lost cause, so Toad punched them both out while they still had a little room left in the seat performance envelope. Apparently they were closer to the edge of the envelope than he thought.”

  “TRX doesn’t have another prototype.”

  “I know. We’re going to have to go with the data we have. I’ll get started on the report as soon as I get back to Washington. But I would appreciate it if you would get a team of experts from the company that made that fly-by-wire system out here, like tomorrow. Have them bring their test equipment. We need some instant answers.”

  “You have the box?”

  “One of them, anyway. It’s a little mashed up, but all the circuitry and boards appear intact. I’m hoping they can test it.”

  “Why not just put it on a plane to the factory?”

  “I want to be there when they check it out. And just now I can’t leave here.”

  “I understand.”

  They talked for several more minutes, then hung up. Both men had a lot to do.

  Toad wandered the corridors, looking in on Rita from time to time. A nurse was with her every minute. The evening nurse was a woman in her thirties, and she never gave him more than a glance. Rita was in good hands, he told himself. But she didn’t move. She just lay there in the ICU cubicle with her eyes closed, her chest slowly rising and falling in time with the mechanical hissing and clicking of the respirator. The IVs dripped and the heart monitor made its little green lines on the cathode-ray tube. What he could see of her face was swollen, mottled.

  So after looking yet again at Rita and her bandages and all the equipment, he would wander off down the hall, lost in his own thoughts.

  Hospitals in the evening are dismal places, especially when there aren’t many visitors. The staffers rush on unknown errands along the waxed linoleum of the corridors. In the rooms lay the sick people with their maladjusted televisions blaring out the networks’ mixture of violence and comedy and ads for the consumer trash of a too wealthy society. The canned laughter and incomprehensible dialogue float through open doors and down the clean, sterile corridors, sounding exactly like the insane cackling of a band of whacked-out dopers. No one in the captive audience laughs or even chuckles at the drivel of the screens. It’s just noise to help survive a miserable experience. Or background noise while you die.

  Toad hated hospitals. He hated all of it—the pathetic potted plants and cut flowers, the carts loaded with dirty dinner trays, the waiting bedpans and urine bottles, the gleaming aluminum IV frames, the distant buzzer of someone trying to summon a nurse, the moans of some poor devil out of his head, the smell of disinfectant, the whispering—he loathed it all.

  He relived the final minutes of the flight yet again. It didn’t matter that he was in a hospital corridor with the TV noise and the nurses talking in the background: he was back in the plane with the negative Gs and the spinning and Rita’s voice in his ears. In his private world the events of seconds expanded into minutes, and every sensation and emotion racked him more powerfully than before.

  He found himself in the staff lounge. He hadn’t eaten since breakfast, but he wasn’t hungry. He got a pop from the machine and sipped it while he inspected the bulletin board. Apparently management was having the usual trouble keeping the staff lounge clean. And the bowling league still needed more people. Come on, people! Sign up and roll a few lines on Thursday nights and forget all these bastards here in the hospital for a little while. They’ll still be here on Friday.

  He thought about calling Rita’s parents, and finally decided to do it. He tried for three minutes to persuade the long-distance operator to bill the call to his number in Virginia, and when she refused, called collect. No one answered.

  Back down the corridor to check on Rita. No change. Another glance from the nurse.

  He walked and walked and flew again, spinning wildly, out of control, the altimeter winding down, down, down, out there on the very edge of life itself.

  “So what are the possibilities?” Jake addressed the question to George Wilson, the aerodynamics expert. The group had watched the videotape made by the chase plane flown by Smoke Judy.

  “It’s an inverted spin, no question,” Wilson said.

  “Why?”

  “The plane has negative stability. All these low-observable designs do. The fly-by-wire system is supposed to keep it from stalling and spinning, and obviously it didn’t.” Everyone there knew what the term “negative stability” meant. If the pilot released the controls, a plane with positive stability would tend to return to a wings-level, stable condition. Neutral stability meant that the airplane would stay in the flight attitude it was in when the controls were released. Negative stability, on the other hand, meant that once the plane was displaced from wings-level, it would tend to increase the rate of displacement if the controls were released.

  “So the fly-by-wire system is the first place to look,” Jake Grafton said. “Smoke, you saw this whole thing up close and personal. Do you have anything you want to add?”

  “No, sir. I think the movie captured it, got even more of it than I remember seeing at the time. We could sit and niggle over her decision to recover from the second spin instead of ejecting, but I doubt that would be fair. It was a prototype and she’s a test pilot.”

  Jake nodded. He agreed with Smoke, as he usually did. He had tried keeping Smoke Judy at arm’s length after that night he saw him in West Virginia, yet except for that unexplained sighting, he had nothing else against the man. Judy was proving to be a fine off
icer and an excellent pilot, a man whose opinions and judgment could be trusted. Which was precisely why Jake had assigned him to fly the chase plane.

  They discussed the test results they had and decided how to proceed. As Jake had told the admiral, his report was going to be written with the data the group had gathered. The reason for the crash would have to be included, if it could be established by the time he was ready to submit the document. So this evening he assigned the bulk of his staff to compiling test results and the rest to investigate, or monitor the contractor’s investigation of, the crash.

  “Except for the people who are working with TRX, the rest of you need to get back to Washington and dig in. Admiral Dunedin and SECNAV will want the report ASAP.”

  Jake Grafton came back to the hospital about ten that night to look in on Rita and talk to the doctor on duty. When he was finished, he dragged Toad off to the VOQ. “If you’re blaming yourself about this, you’d better stop,” he said when they were in the car.

  Tarkington was glum. “She fought it all the way down. The controls were just too sensitive. The plane was out there on the edge of the envelope—high G, high angle of attack—and every time she thought she had it under control she lost it again. She kept saying, ‘I’ve got it this time.’”

  “She’s not a quitter.”

  “Not by a long shot.” Toad looked out the passenger’s side window. “A hundred and twenty pounds of pure guts.”

  “So now you’re telling yourself you should have ejected on the second departure.”

  “Only a thousand times today.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “I should have.”

  “Why didn’t you? Because she is your wife?”