The Minotaur (5 page)

Then Knight took Jake up a floor to the vault, where he signed a
special form acknowledging the security regulations associated
with black programs. In this chamber, surrounded by safes and
locks and steel doors. Commander Knight briefed him on the tech-
nical details of the prototypes, the program schedules and so on.

At three o’clock Jake was back on the twelfth floor of the Crys-
tal City complex to meet with Vice Admiral Dunedin. His office
was not quite as plush as Henry’s but it was every bit as large. Out
the large windows airliners were landing and taking off from Na-
tional airport.

“Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?” Dunedin
asked. He was soft-spoken, with short gray hair and workman’s
hands, thick, strong fingers that even now showed traces of oil and
grease. Jake remembered hearing that his hobby was restoring old
cars.

“In a vague, hazy way.”

“Normally we assign Aeronautical Engineering Duty Officers,
AEDOs, to be program managers. By definition, an AEDO’s spe-
cialty is the procurement business. Harold Strong was an AEDO.
But, considering the status of the A-12, we figured that we needed
a war fighter with credibility on the Hill.” The Hill, Jake knew,
was Capitol Hill, Congress. But who, he wondered, were the “we”
of whom the admiral spoke? “You’re our warrior. There’s not
enough time to send you to the five-month program manager
school, so we’ve waived it. You’re going to have to hit the ground
running. Your deputy is a GS-15 civilian. Dr. Helmut Pritsche.
He’s only been here three years or so but he knows the ropes. And
you’ve got some AEDOs on your staff. Use them, but remember,
you’re in charge.”

“I won’t forget,” Jake Grafton said.

Dunedin’s secretary, Mrs. Forsythe, gave him a list of the of-
ficers who would be under his supervision. She was a warm, moth-
erly lady with silver-gray hair and pictures of children on her desk.
Jake asked. Her grandchildren. She offered him a brownie she had
baked last night, which he accepted and munched with approving
comments while she placed a call to the Personnel Support De-
tachment She gave him detailed directions on how to find PSD,
which was, she explained, six buildings south. When Jake arrived
fifteen minutes later a secretary was busy pulling the service
records for him to examine.

He found an empty desk and settled in.

The civilian files stood out from the others. Helmut Fritsche.
Ph.D. in electrical engineering, formerly professor at Caltech, be-
fore that on the research staff of NASA. Publications; wow! Thirty
or forty scientific papers. Jake ran his eye down the list. All were
about radar: wave propagation, Doppler effect, numerical determi-
nation of three-dimensional electromagnetic scattering, and so on.

George Wilson was a professor of aeronautical engineering at
MIT on a one-year sabbatical. He had apparently been recruited by
Admiral Henry and came aboard the first of the year. He would be
leaving at the end of December. Like Fritsche’s, Wilson’s list of
professional publications was long and complicated. He had co-
authored at least one textbook, but the title that caught Jake’s eye
was an article for a scientific journal: “Aerodynamic Challenges in
Low Radar Cross Section Platforms.”

Jake laid the civilians’ files aside and began to flip through the
naval officers. Halfway through he found one that he slowed down
to examine with care. Lieutenant Rita Moravia. Naval Academy
Class of ‘82. Second in her class at the Academy, first in her class
in flight school and winner of an outstanding achievement award.
Went through A-7 training, then transferred to F/A-ISs, where she
became an instructor pilot in the West Coast replacement squad-
ron. Next came a year at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monte-
rey, California, for a master’s in aeronautical engineering, and an-
other year at Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland,
where she graduated first in her class.

There were three line commanders: an A-6 bombardier-naviga-
tor, an F-14 pilot and an EA-6B Electronic Countermeasures Of-
ficer—ECMO. Jake knew the A-6 BN and the Prowler ECMO.
There was an aircraft maintenance specialist, whom Jake knew,
and five AEDOs, all of whom wore pilot or naval flight officer
wings. Except for the A-6 BN and the Prowler ECMO, the rest
had fighter backgrounds, including Tarkington, who was one of
only two lieutenants. The rest were commanders and lieutenant
commanders.

If the navy wanted a stealth attack plane, why so many fighter
types? The air force called all their tactical drivers fighter pilots,
but the navy had long ago divided the tactical fraternity into attack
and fighter. The missions and the aircraft were completely differ-
ent, so the training and tactics were also different. And according
to the amateur psychologists in uniform who thought about these
things and announced their conclusions at Happy Hour, the men
were different too. Either their personalities were altered by the
training or the missions attracted men of certain types. According
to the attack community, fighter pukes were devil-may-care, kiss-
tomorrow-goodbye romantics who lived and lusted for the dubious
glory of individual combat in the skies. The fighter crowd said the
attack pukes were phlegmatic plodders with brass balls—and no
imaginations—who dropped bombs because they didn’t know any
better. Most of it was good, clean fun, but with a tinge of truth.

When Jake finished going through the records he stacked them
carefully and stared thoughtfully at the pile. Dunedin and Strong
had assembled a good group, he concluded, officers with excellent
though varied backgrounds, from all over tactical naval aviation-
The test pilot was the only real question mark. Moravia certainly
had her tickets punched and was probably smarter than Einstein,
but she had no actual experience in flight-testing new designs. He
would ask Dunedin about her.

Tomorrow he would meet them. That was soon enough. First he
had to find out what was really happening from Henry or Dunedin.

Henry spoke of minefields—a grotesque understatement. The
problems inherent in overcoming the inertia of the bureaucracy to
produce a new state-of-the-art weapons system were nothing short
of mind-boggling. Dunedin must feel like he’s been ordered to
build the Great Pyramid armed with nothing but a used condom
and a flyswatter. And for God’s sake, do it quietly, top secret and
all. Aye aye, sir.

In the Crystal City underground mall he found a toy store and
purchased a plastic model of the air force’s new stealth fighter, the
F-117. He also bought a tube of glue. Then he boarded the Metro
blue train for the ride to Rosslyn.

When the subway surfaced near the Key Bridge, Jake stared
gloomily at the raindrops smearing the dirt on the windows as the
train rocked along under a dark gray sky, then it raced noisily back
into another hole in the ground and like his fellow passengers, he
refocused his eyes vacantly on nothing as he instinctively created
his own little private space.

He felt relieved when the doors finally opened and he joined the
other passengers surging across the platform, through the turn-
stiles, then onto the world’s longest escalator. The moving stair
ascended slowly up the gloomy, slanting shaft bearing its veterans
of purgatory. Amid the jostling, pushing, hustling throng, he was
carried along as part of the flow. This morning he had been a
tourist. Now he was as much a part of this human river as any of
them. Morning and evening he would be an anonymous face in the
mob: hurry along, hurry, push and shove gently, persistently, insis-
tently, demanding equal vigor and speed from every set of legs,
equal privacy from every set of blank, unfocused eyes. Hurry,
hurry along.

Rain was still falling when he reached the sidewalk. He paused
and turned his collar up against the damp and chill, then set off for
the giant condo complex four blocks away.

Most of the people scurrying past him on the sidewalk had done
this every working day for years. They were moles, he told himself
glumly, blind creatures of the dark, damp places where the sun and
wind never reached, unaware that the universe held anything but
the dismal corridors where they lived out their pathetic lives. And
now he was one of them.

He stopped at the corner, the model in the box under his arm.
People swirled around him, their heads down, their eyes on the
concrete. Callie wouldn’t get home to the flat for another hour.

He turned and walked back against the flow of the crowd toward
the station exit. Right across the street from the exit was a Roy
Rogers. He paid for a cup of coffee and found a seat near the
atrium window where he could watch the gray people bent against
the wind and the raindrops sliding down the glass.

The euphoria he had felt when he talked to Vice Admiral Henry
this morning was completely gone. Now he had a job … a pa-
perwork job, going to endless meetings and listening to reports and
writing recommendations and trying to keep from going crazy. A
job in the bureaucracy. A staff job, the one he had fought against,
refused to take, pulled every string to avoid, all these years. In the
puzzle palace, the place where good ideas go to die.

It could have been worse, of course. He could have been as-
signed to design the new officer fitness report form.

Like many officers who spent their careers in operational billets,
Jake Grafton loathed the bureaucrats, held them in a secret con-
tempt which he tried to suppress with varying degrees of success.
In the years since World War II, the bureaucracy had grown lush
and verdant here in Washington. Every member of Congress had
twenty aides. Every social problem had a staff of paper pushers
”managing” it. The military was just as bad. Joint commands with
a staff of a thousand to fifteen hundred people were common.

Perhaps it happens because we are human. The people in the
military endlessly analyze and train for the last war because no one
knows what the next one will be Uke. New equipment and technol-
ogies deepen the gloom which always cloaks the future. Yesterday’s
warriors retire and new ones inherit the stars and the offices, and
so it goes through generations, until at last every office is filled with
men who have never heard a shot fired in anger or known a single
problem that good, sound staff work, carefully couched in
bureaucratese, could not “manage” satisfactorily. Inevitably the
gloom becomes Stygian. Future war becomes a profound enigma
that workaday admirals and generals and congressmen cannot pen-
etrate. So the staffs proliferate as each responsible person seeks
expert help with his day-to-day duties and the insoluble policy
conundrums.

Another war would be necessary to teach the new generation the
ancient truths. But in the Pax Americana following World War II,
Vietnam accelerated the damage rather than arrested it.

In its aftermath Vietnam appeared to many as the first inadver-
tent, incautious step toward the nuclear inferno that would destroy
life on this planet. Frightened by the new technologies and fearful
of the incomprehensible political forces at work throughout the
world, citizens and soldiers sought—demanded—quantifiable
truths and controls that would prevent the war that bad become
unthinkable, the future war that had become, for the generations
that had known only peace, the ultimate obscenity. Laws and regu-
lations and incomprehensible organizational charts multiplied like
bacteria in a petri dish. Engineers with pocket calculators became
soothsayers to the terrified.

All of this Jake Grafton knew, and knowing it, was powerless to
change. And now he was one of them, one of the faceless savants
charged with creating salvation on his desk and placing it in the
out basket.

Over on the beach it was probably raining like this. The wind
would be moaning around the house and leaking around the win-
dowpanes. The surf would be pounding on the sand. It would be a
great evening for a walk along the beach under a gray sky, by that
gray sea. Suddenly he felt an overpowering longing to feel the wind
in his hair and the salt air in his nostrils.

Oh, to be there and not here! Not here with the problems and the
hassles and the responsibilities.

His eye fell upon the bag that the clerk had placed the F-I17
model in. He ripped out the staple and slid the box from the bag.
The artist had painted the plane black. It had twin vertical stabiliz-
ers, slanted in at the bottom, and flat sides all over the place, all of
which he suspected were devilishly expensive to manufacture. The
intakes were on top of the fuselage, behind the canopy. How would
the engines get air when the pilot was pulling Gs, maneuvering? He
stared at the picture. No doubt this plane was fly-by-wire with a
flight control computer stabilizing the machine and automatically
trimming. But what would it feel like to fly it? What would be the
weight and performance penalty to get this thing aboard ship?
How much were they going to cost? Could these machines ever be
worth the astronomical sums the manufacturers would want to
charge? The politicians would decide.

Jake drained his coffee and threw the cup in the trash can by the
door. He pulled the bag up over the box and rolled the excess
tightly, then pushed the door open and stepped out into the eve-
ning.

“Hi, darling,” Callie said brightly when she came home and found
Jake assembling the model on the kitchen table.

“Hey, beautiful.” Jake looked up and grinned at her, then re-
sumed his chore of gluing the landing gear into the wheel wells.

“So how was the first day back at the office?”

Jake laid the plastic model on the diagram and leaned back. in
his chair. He stretched. “Okay, I guess. They didn’t tie me to the
wooden post where they shoot traitors, and nobody said anything
about a court-martial, so I guess I’m still in the navy.” He winked
at her. “It’s going to be all right. Don’t sweat it.”