The Minotaur (25 page)

Toad reluctantly took a last lick at that swollen nipple, then
shifted his body until his eyes were inches from hers. “Are you
trying to tell me you’re in love with me?”

She frowned. “I suppose. It hasn’t happened quite the way I
always dreamed it would. Girls have their fantasies.” She took a
tiny little nip on her lower lip. “I hope I’m saying this right. You
don’t mind, do you?”

“I’m delighted. I’m falling in love with you and I’m glad you feel
the same way.”

“I love you,” Rita Moravia said softly, savoring it, then gently
pulled his mouth onto hers.

When she was asleep. Toad eased out of bed and peered through
the curtain. He was restless. Why had he said that—that falling-in-
love stuff? Only a cretin tells a woman that just before he beds her.
He sat in a chair and worried a fingernail. He was getting in over
his head again and he had his doubts. Was he just scared? Nah, a
little frightened maybe, nervous, but not scared. Why is it all
women want to fall in love? He wondered what Samuel Dodgers
would say on that subject

Dreyfus laid it on Camacho’s desk and sat down to light his pipe.
Camacho knew what it was: his boss had called him. It was a copy
of a letter. The original was at the lab.

He opened the folder that the lab technicians used for copies and
glanced at it. There was no date. The envelope was postmarked
Bakersfield, California, three days ago. The message was in florid
longhand, yet quite legible.

Dear Sir,

I think it’s my duty to inform you that my daughter’s hus-
band, Petty Officer First Class Terry Franklin USN, is a spy.
He works at the Pentagon. Computers, or something like that.
I don’t know how long he has been a spy, but he is. My
daughter Lucy is sure he is and so am I. He got a funny phone
call once that Lucy overheard and he got really really mad
when he found out Lucy mentioned her suspicions to a neigh-
bor. Lucy is afraid of him and so am I. He is crazy. He is a spy
like that Walker fellow.

We are good citizens and pay our taxes and know you will
do what has to be done. We are sorry for him but he did this
himself. Lucy had absolutely nothing to do with this spy
thing, and that’s why I am writing this letter. I wanted her to
write it but she said she just couldn’t, even though she knows
it has to be this way. Please arrest him and keep Lucy and the
kids out of it. Please don’t tell the newspapers he is married.
His name is Terry Franklin and he works at the Pentagon and
he is a spy. And PLEASE, whatever you do, don’t tell Terry
we told on him. He is crazy.

Sincerely,
Flora May Southworth

“Can you get a divorce in California if your spouse is a spy?”

Dreyfus snorted. “You can get a divorce in California if your
spouse farts in bed.”

“Progressive as hell.”

“Right out front.”

“Better call out there and have an agent go interview them. Tell
him to stay all afternoon and take lots of notes.”

“You don’t want them going to the press?”

“Do you know what the committee is going to want to do about
this?”

“Well, they sure are gonna have to do something. Now we got
the mother-in-law writing us letters. They probably talked to their
minister and a lawyer and every neighbor in a five-block radius.”

“Not letters. A letter. One letter with no hard facts and a variety
of unsubstantiated allegations. We get two dozen letters like this
every month from people out to get even with someone in a sensi-
tive job. I repeat, do you know what the committee—“

“No.” He spit it out.

“So we had better do our best to convince Mrs. Southworth we
are going like gangbusters on this hot tip. Pledge confidentiality.
Better send two agents. Tell them to be thorough. Then two days
later go back for a follow-up interview with more questions. New
questions, not repeats.”

“A major break like this, maybe you want to send me out there
to see that they do it right? I could go by bus, get there in a week or
so.”

Camacho ignored him. He picked up the letter and read it again.
Then he pulled a legal pad around and began making notes. Drey-
fus got the message and left in a swirl of smoke, closing the door
behind him.

Camacho threw the legal pad at the door.

14

With its twin engines bellowing a
roar that could be heard for several miles, the Intruder departed
the earth with a delicate wiggle, a perceptible rocking of the wings
that Rita Moravia automatically smoothed with the faintest side
pressure on the control stick. She had let the takeoff trim setting
rotate the plane’s nose to eight degrees nose-up and had stopped it
there with a nudge of forward stick in that delicious moment when
the weight of twenty-five tons of machine and fuel was transferred
from the main landing gear to the wings. This was the transition to
flight, a shimmering, imprecise hesitation as the machine gathered
its strength and the wings took a firm bite into the warm morning
air.

Now safely airborne, Rita slapped the gear handle up with her
left hand. Her right thumb flicked at the coolie-hat button on the
top of the stick, trimming the stick pressure to neutral as the twin-
engined warplane accelerated.

She checked to make sure the landing gear were up and locked.
They were. Temps, RPMs, fuel flow normal. Oil and hydraulic
pressure okay. Using her left hand again, she raised the flap handle
as she caressed the stick with her right to hold the nose steady
through the configuration change. Accelerating nicely. Flaps and
slats up and in and the stabilizer shifted, she isolated the flight
hydraulic system and continued to trim. At 290 knots indicated
she pulled the nose higher into the sky in order to comply with
Jake Grafton’s directive not to exceed 300 knots.

Toad had activated the IFF and was talking to Departure. Now
he switched to Los Angeles Center. The controller asked him to
push the identification button on the IFF—“squawk ident”—and
he complied. “Xray Echo 22, radar contact. Come left to a heading
of 020. Passing Flight Level 180, proceed on course.”

Rita Moravia dipped the left wing as Toad rogered.

When she leveled the wings on course, still climbing, he was
humming and singing over the ICS as he tuned the radar presenta-
tion and checked that he had property entered the computer way-
points. “ffi-ho, hi-ho, it’s off to work we go, with a hi-hi-hee and a
fiddly-dee, hi-hi, ho-ho . . .”

Rita grinned behind her oxygen mask. Flying with the Toadman
was an experience. No wonder Captain Grafton’s face softened
every time he saw Tarkington.

She leveled the plane at Flight Level 310—31,000 feet—and en-
gaged the autopilot. Just above them a thin, wispy layer slid across
the top of the canopy, so close it seemed they could almost reach
up and let the gauzy tendrils slip around their fingers. Rita looked
ahead and tried to find that point where the motion of the ropy
filaments seemed to originate as they came racing toward the cock-
pit, accelerating as the distance closed. It was like flying just under
an infinite, flat ceiling—some Steven Spielberg effect to give the
audience a rush of speed and wonder as the woofers oomphed and
the seats throbbed, before the credits came on the screen.

After a moment she disengaged the autopilot and let the nose
creep up a smidgen. Almost imperceptibly the plane rose a hun-
dred feet, where the cloud layer literally sliced around the cockpit.
Toad picked that moment to withdraw his head from the radar
scope and look slowly around. After a moment he glanced at her
and caught her eye. She saw him wink, then readjust the hood and
devote his attention to the computer and radar.

A lifetime of work, all for this.

She had been an outstanding student at an excellent suburban
high school, one of those bright youngsters who applied themselves
in a frenzy of self-discipline and diligence that separated her from
her classmates, who were more interested in boys. music and peer
acceptance than school. She had shocked everyone, including her
parents, by her announcement that she wanted to attend a military
academy. In due course an appointment to the Naval Academy
came from a congressman who knew better than to echo her moth-
er’s surprise or horror in an era when socially correct posturing
was more important than his voting record.

So she set forth bravely that summer after high school, at the age
of eighteen, set off into the unknown world of plebes at the Naval
Academy, this girl who had never set foot on a military installa-
tion, this girl who knew only that she wanted to make her own way
in life and that way would be much different from those of her
mother or the friends of her youth.

It had been worse than different. It had been horrid, humiliating
nightmare beyond anything she had imagined in her worst mo-
ments of trepidation. All the sly taunts of her friends, bound for
sororities and, they hoped, excellent marriages, hadn’t even hinted
at the emotional trauma she experienced those first weeks. During
the day she braced and marched and ran and endured the hazing
and shouting to the point of exhaustion, and at night she sobbed
herself to sleep wondering if she had made the right choice- Finally
one day she realized that she hadn’t cried in a week. Her second,
more important revelation occurred one morning at breakfast
when an upperclassman had demanded to know the name of the
Soviets’ chief arms negotiator. She had answered the question cor-
rectly, and as he turned his attention to a gawky boy from Georgia
seated beside her, she realized that these people were demanding
nothing from her she could not accomplish. From then on she had
cheerfully endured, and finally excelled.

She thought of those times this morning as the Intruder flew out
from under the thin cloud layer into a crystal-clear desert sky and
Toad Tarkington, the professional who had been there and back,
caressed the system with a loving touch. She had made the right
choice.

Sixty miles out she once again disengaged the autopilot and low-
ered the nose slightly, then slowly pulled the throttles aft as her
speed crept up toward 300 knots indicated. She always liked the
feel of the plane as it descended in these long, shallow, power-on
glides, gravity helping the engines drive the plane down into the
thicker, denser air near the earth- She could feel every knot of the
airspeed the engines didn’t generate—free airspeed it seemed,
though of course it wasn’t. Because she was the airplane and it was
her, the energy was hers: the speed and the life and the power, she
absorbed and possessed and became all of it.

Wingtip speed brakes cracked, but not enough. She flicked them
out some more and felt the buffeting of the disturbed air, a gentle
shaking that imparted itself to her through the stick and throttles
and the seat in which she sat. Satisfied, she slid the speed-brake
switch forward with her left thumb. The boards closed obediently
and the buffeting ceased.

The desert below was baked brown and red and grayish black
unleavened by the green of life. As she came down she could see
sand and dirt in valleys and washes and rock the color of new iron
in jagged cliffs and ridges.

Toad was chatting with Jake Grafton on the radio. “Never fear,
the pros are here.”

“Amen,” Grafton replied. It’s a good thing Dodgers is back in
China Lake, Rita thought

“Okay, Misty, I have you in sight. Drop to about 8,000 on the
pressure altimeter”—the land here was 4.000 feet above sea level—
“and come north up the valley until you see the van. It’s red and
has a yellow cross on the top.”

“What kind of a cross,” she asked curiously.

“Dodgers’ son painted it. Three guesses.”
“I see it.” At this height it was just a speck amid the dirt and
boulders.

“0kay, circle the van at a distance of three miles or so and I’ll
tell you when to turn on your gadget.”

“Roger that,” Toad said, and Rita flew away from the van, then
turned to establish herself on the circle with her left wingtip
pointed at the van.

Toad again examined the little box that had been taped to the
top of the glare shield in front of him. The box wasn’t much. It had
a three-position power switch which he had had in the middle, or
standby, position for the last five minutes. While in standby the
coolant was circulating around the Athena computer. Beside the
power switch was a little green light that would come on to verify
that the computer was receiving electrical power, and another
light, yellow, to show when the system was detecting signals from
an outside source. When that yellow light was on, the Athena
system was doing its thing. There was a red light too, but that
would illuminate only when the temperature of the super-cooled
computer exceeded a level that endangered it. If that light came
on, Toad was to turn off the system.

Down on the ground Jake watched Harold Dodgers and Helmut
Fritsche at the radar control panel. “Got em,” Fritsche said after a
bit, speaking loudly over the steady snoring of the engine of the
generator mounted on the trailer behind the van. The engine noise
muffled the moan of the Intruder’s engines except when it had
passed almost overhead. Jake looked at the green display. “Tell ‘em
to turn it on.”

Jake did so. In less than two seconds the blip faded from the
scope. Magic! Involuntarily he looked toward that spot in the sky
where the plane had to be. Yes, there it was, just now a flash as the
sun glinted from the canopy, then fading to a dull yet visible white
spot in the washed-out blue. He looked again at the scope. Noth-
ing.

“Maybe if they tightened the circle, flew closer,” Fritsche sug-
gested.

The plane was still invisible. However, at five miles from the
radar the strength of the emissions from Athena was too much: it
beaconed and a false blip appeared at two miles and another at five.

“Dad’s gonna have to tweak it,” Harold Dodgers said, his voice
confident and cheerful. “But by gum, it works.”

“Sure enough does,” Jake Grafton said, and wiped the perspira-
tion from his forehead. Hard to believe, but that crackpot and his
genius son had invented a device that would revolutionize warfare.
Just as Admiral Henry had known it would.

After another twenty minutes, during which the Intruder flew
back and forth in straight lines tangent to the five-mile circle so
that Fritsche could chart the Athena’s protection envelope, Jake
told Rita and Toad to go on back to China Lake, where Dr. Dodg-
ers would tweak the computer. Then Rita and Toad would bring
the plane back here for another session. Jake would have preferred
to stage the plane from NAS Fallen, just a few miles west, but
Admiral Dunedin had vetoed that on the grounds that base secu-
rity there would be inadequate.

“Helmut, you better drive over to the range office and call Dodg-
ers on the scrambler and tell him how it went. Then call Admiral
Dunedin in Washington.”

“Sure-” Fritsche trotted over to the gray navy sedan parked near
the van and left in a cloud of dust. Harold Dodgers killed the
generator, which backfired once and fell silent. Now the Intruder’s
engines were plainly audible, the moan echoing from the rocky
ridges and outcrops.

“CAG,” said a male voice on the radio. “Are we sweet or
what?”

“You’re sweet. Misty. See you this afternoon back here.”

Jake watched the white dot shrink to nothing in the blue sky as
Rita climbed away to the south. When even the engine noise was
gone and all he could hear was the wind whispering across the
aand, he walked over to the shade by the side of the van and sat
down.

Any way you looked at it, Athena was mind-boggling. A reli-
gious crackpot working in a shop that looks as if it should be full of
broken-down cars comes up with an invention that will instantly
obsolesce all conventional radar technology. But perhaps it wasn’t
as wild as it appeared. After all, without the benefit of budgets,
bureaucrats, and MBA supervisors worried about short-term prof-
itability, Thomas Edison had single-handedly electrified the world
and along the way fathered the recording and motion-picture in-
dustry. With the same advantages Samuel Dodgers had made junk
of all existing Quinary radar systems and the tactics and strategy
built around those systems. And if you’re keeping score, he also
just blew the B-2 program out of the sky. Why buy stealth bombers
for $516 million each when you can make an existing plane invisi-
ble with a $250,000 device and some superglue?

A lot of people were going to be seriously unhappy when they
heard. Powerful people, the kind that had both their senators’ un-
listed Washington numbers on their Rolodex.

Jake Grafton picked up a handful of dirt and let it trickle
through his fingers, Tyler Henry, Ludlow, Royce Caplinger—they
were sitting on a bomb. No doubt they’ll let Jake Grafton go it
alone for a while, stand out there by himself in front of the crowd
as the duty expert. After he had run the bloomers up the flagpole
and they had precisely measured the direction and velocity of the
wind, then and only then would they decide what to do.

They must have been ecstatic when they realized that Jake Graf-
ton was just the man they needed: a genuine, decorated live hero
whom they could stand with shoulder to shoulder or disavow as a
crazed maverick, whichever way the cookie crumbled. They would
throw him to die sharks without a second thought if they con-
cluded that course looked best. Too bad, but he always was an
Officer who couldn’t take orders, not a team player. And after that
El Hakim thing, a bad concussion, psychiatrists; he was never right
in the head. Too bad.

These powerful people whose boats would start leaking when the
Athena secret came out, what would they do? Fight. How? What
would be their weapons?

The dirt escaping his fingers made a sculpted pile. The wind
swirled away a portion of each handful. The slower the dirt trick-
led from his fingers, the more of it the wind claimed.

The most probable argument, Jake decided, was that Athena
would destabilize the existing East-West military balance. This ar-
gument had finesse. Athena was too cheap to argue the dollars. So
argue the consequences. Argue that Athena pushes Russia closer
to a first strike. Argue nuclear war and radioactive ashes and the
Four Horsemen. If you can’t dazzle them with logic or baffle them
with bullshit, then scare the bejesus out of them.

Jake stood and stirred the pile of dust with his toe. The wind
carried it away grain by grain.

It was late afternoon, on the third flight of the day, and Rita was
flying straight legs north and south, each leg one mile farther west
of the radar site. Toad was bored. He was using the navigation
system to ensure she stayed precisely where Captain Grafton
wanted her to be. That was the hard part. After he had turned on
the Athena system there was nothing to do but monitor its “oper-
ating” light. He did keep an eye on the Athena temp light, so if it
came on he could turn off the system in a smart, military manner.
For this the U.S. Navy was using its best Naval Flight Officer, a
professional aerial warrior. Peace is hell.

Off to the west, down on the desert, was a long shadow cast by
the two-story black windowless building that constituted the only
structure in the town known as Deegon’s Well. That building was a
whorehouse. Presumably it also contained the office of the mayor
and the rest of the municipal employees. From this distance it
appeared to be just a tiny box on the desert. He knew it was
painted black and had two stories and no windows because he had
once inspected it from the parking lot in front. Just a tourist, of
course.

He keyed his ICS mike to call Rita’s attention to this famous
landmark, but thought better of it.

Rita was checking the fuel remaining in the various tanks. He
pressed his head against the radar hood and examined the cursor
position.

He heard a whump, a loud, loose whump, and instantaneously
the air pressure and noise level rose dramatically. Something
struck him. He jerked his head back from the hood and looked
around wildly.

The wind howled, shrieked, screamed, even through his helmet.
Rita was back against her seat, slumped down, covered with gore,
her right hand groping wildly for her face.

A bird! They had hit a bird.

He keyed the ICS without conscious thought and said her name.
He couldn’t hear the sound of his own voice.

The plane was rolling off on one wing, the nose dipping. He used
his left hand to grab the stick between Rita’s knees and center it.

Slow down. They had to slow down, had to lessen the velocity of
the wind funneling through that smashed-out left quarter panel.
The bird must have come through there and crashed against Rita
as she bent over the fuel management panel on the left console.

He pulled back on the stick to bring the nose up into a climb and
concentrated on keeping the wings level. Higher. Higher. Twenty
degrees nose-up. Airspeed dropping: 250 indicated, 240, 230—he
should drop the gear and flaps, get this flying pig slowed way down
—210 knots.

The gear handle was on the left side of the instrument panel,
right under the hole where the plexiglas quarter panel used to be,
right under that river of air that was pressurizing the cockpit.

He tried to reach it. Just beyond his fingertips. Harness release
unlocked. No go. Juggling the stick with his left hand, he used his
right to release the two Koch fittings on the top of his torso har-
ness. If the seat fired now he wouldn’t have a parachute. He
reached again. Nope. He was going to have to unfasten the Koch
fittings that held his bottom to the ejection seat. With fingers that
were all thumbs he released the two catches, then attacked the
bayonet fittings on his oxygen mask. Might as well get it off too. He
jerked loose the cord that went to the earphones in his helmet.

Damn—he was stalling. He could feel the buffet and the nose
pitched forward. He let it go down and got some airspeed, then
eased it back.

He was having difficulty holding the wings level. Power at about
86 percent on both engines. That was okay. But the smell—Jesus
God!

The overpowering odor made his eyes water. He tried to breathe
only through his mouth.

No longer restrained by the inertia reel in the ejection seat, he
grasped the stick with his right hand and stretched across with his
left to the gear handle and slapped it down.

Now for the flaps. He was lying across the center console, trying
to keep his head out of the wind blast as be felt for the flap lever
beside the throttle quadrant. Leave the throttles alone. Get the
flaps down to thirty degrees. Fumbling, he pulled the lever aft.

Toad was overcorrecting with the stick as he fought to keep the
wings level, first too much one way, then too much the other.
Goddamn, those peckerhead pilots do this without even thinking
about it.

There! Gear down and locked. Flaps and slats out, stabilator
Shifted. Hallelujah.

He glanced up at Rita. She had shit and blood and gore all over
her face and shoulders. Feathers. They were everywhere!

Her helmet—it was twisted sideways. Using glances, he tried to
wipe off the worst of the crap with his left hand as he concentrated
on holding the plane straight and level: 140 knots now, 8,300 feet
on the altimeter. Conditions in the cockpit were a lot better.

Were there any mountains this high around here? He couldn’t
remember, and he couldn’t see over the top of the instrument
panel, bent over the way he was.

First things first- He twisted her helmet back straight. The face
Shield was shattered, broken, but it had protected her face and eyes
from the worst of the impact

She was dazed. She damn well better come out of it quick, be-
cause he sure couldn’t land this plane.

Her right eye was covered with goo, whether hers or the bird’s
be couldn’t tell. He wiped at it with his gloved fingers. The bird’s.

Her left eye was clear but unfocused, bunking like crazy.
“C’mon, Rita baby. I can’t keep flying this thing!” In his frustra-
tion he shouted. She couldn’t hear him.

Back to the panel: 135 knots. Maybe he could engage the autopi-
lot

Yeah, the autopilot. If it would work. He jabbed at the switches
and released the stick experimentally. Yeah! Hot damn! It engaged.

He devoted his attention to her. Cuffed her gently, rubbed her
cheeks- She shook her head and raised her right hand to her face.