The Minotaur jg-3 Page 31

  “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 wed- ding presents for all of your friends, she was so looking forward to inviting every one of them to your wedding. You’re her only daugh- ter!” 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.

  “0ne 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 glori- ous announcements. Strictly business.”

  “Yes, sir,” Rita said.

  “I warned you about this, Tarkington. No romances, I said. And look at you! It’s disgusting, that’s what it is.”

  “Yessir,” Toad said.

  “I can’t let you out of my sight for a minute.”

  “I just couldn’t control myself, sir.”

  “You two are going to be very happy someday. But not today or tomorrow. Right now you’re serious, committed, dedicated profes- sionals. Pretend. Try real hard.”

  “Yessir,” they both said.

  “Congratulations. Get back to work.”

  “Aye aye, sir.” They came to attention like plebes at the Naval Academy, did a smart about-face and marched out, Rita leading. Jake Grafton bit his lip and resumed work on his report.

  19

  Somebody explain how this air- plane is going to be used.” Jake Grafton looked from face to face. He had his staff gathered around while he stood at the office black- board with marker in hand. “Who wants the floor?”

  “Captain, there’s been two or three studies on that written dur- ing the last three or four years,” said Smoke Judy.

  “I know. Somebody dug them out for me and I read them. I want to hear your ideas.”

  “Seems to me,” said Toad Tarkington, “that the first thing it has to do is land and take off from a carrier. Must be carrier-compati- ble.”

  Jake wrote that down. Obvious, but often overlooked. Any navy attack plane must have a tailhook, nose tow, strong keel, routinely tolerate a six-hundred foot-per-minute sink rate collision with the deck on landing, fit into allotted deck space and accept electrical power and inertial allignnent information from the ship’s systems. It had to be capable of being launched from existing catapults and arrested with existing machinery. In addition, it would have to be able to fly down a 3.5-degree glide slope carrying enough power to make a wave-off possible, and with a low enough nose attitude so that the pilot could see the carrier’s optical landing system. Amaz- ingly enough, in the late 1960s the navy was almost forced to buy a plane that wasn’t carrier-compatible — the TFX, which the air force called the F-111 and immediately began using as an all- weather tactical bomber with a system identical to the A-6’s.

  “Corrosion-resistant,” Tarkington added as Jake made furious notes. “Has to be able to withstand long exposure to salty environ- ment without a lot of expensive maintenance.”

  “Maintenance,” muttered Les Richards. “Got to have easy maintainability designed in. Easy access to engines, black boxes and so forth, without a lot of special equipment.”

  The requirements came thick and fast now, as quick as Jake could write. Range, speed, payload and a lot of other parameters. After ten minutes he had filled up most of the board and his staff paused for air.

  “How’re we going to use this thing?” he asked again. “What I’m getting at is this: these stealth designs appear to be optimized for high-altitude ingress over heavily defended territory. Presumably at night. Are all our missions going to be at night?”

  “W can’t afford to give away the day,” someone said.

  “What’s that mean in the way of aircraft capability? Daytime means enemy fighters and optically aimed surface-to-air missiles. They’ll see our plane. Do we have to be able to engage the fighters and dodge the missiles? How much G capability do we need? Sus- tained turning ability? Dash speed? CHmb speed? Will we go in low in the daytime? If so, how about ability to withstand bird strikes and turbulence?”

  The staff spent an hour on these questions. There was no consen- sus, nor did Jake expect one. No plane in the world could do everything, but any design must meet most of the major require- ments for its intended employment. Shortcomings due to design trade-offs would have to be overcome or endured.

  “Weapons.” The ideal plane would carry and deliver every weapon in the U.S. and NATO inventory, and a lot of them. Was that a realistic goal with the stealth designs under consideration?

  After four hours of brainstonning, the staff reexamined the pro- posed test program for the prototypes. In the five nights of each airplane that SECDEF had budgeted money and time for, they needed to acquire as much information as possible to answer real questions. Company test pilots had already flown both planes. These five nights of each plane by the navy would have to produce data that verified or refuted the manufacturers’ claims. More im- portantly, the nights would determine which plane was best suited to fill the navy’s mission requirements, or which could be made so by cost-effective modifications.

  “We really need more than five flights per plane. Captain,” Les Richards said.

  “Five flights are enough for what we want to find out, if we do it right. This little evolution is just a new car test drive with us doing the driving. Five flights are enough for what we want to find out if we do it right, which is precisely what we’re going to do. Henry and Ludlow and Caplinger want a fast recommendation and a fast decision,”

  “Don’t they always? Then the paper pushers in SECDEFs office will spend a couple years mulling it over, sending it from in basket to in basket.”

  “Ours is not to reason why…”

  The pace accelerated relentlessly in the office. Working days lasted twelve hours now, and Jake ran everyone out and turned off the lights himself at 7 P.M. He insisted that no one work on Satur- day and Sunday, believing that the break would make people more productive during the week.

  The weeks slid by, one by one.

  Jake spent less than half his time in the office and the rest in an endless series of meetings with people from everywhere in govern- ment: SECNAV, SECDEF, OPNAV, NAVAIR, NAVSEA, the FAA, the EPA. the air force, the marines, and a host of others. Most of the time he attended these conferences with Admiral Dun- edin or Commander Rob Knight.

  The meetings went on and on, the paper piled higher and higher. The same subjects kept cropping up in different meetings, where they had to be rehashed again and again. Government by commit- tee is government by consensus, and key players from every office high and low had to be listened to and pacified.

  Jake felt like the sorcerer’s apprentice as he tried to p
in people down and arrive at final resolutions of issues. Meetings bred more meetings: the final item on every agenda was to set the times and places for follow-up meetings.

  He discovered to his horror that no one person had a complete grasp of the tens of thousands of regulations and directives that covered every aspect of procurement. At every meeting, it seemed, someone had another requirement that needed to be at least given lip service. He finally found where all this stuff was stored, a li- brary that at last measurement contained over 1,152 linear feet of statutes, regulations, directives, and case law concerning defense procurement. Jake Grafton looked at this collection in awe and disgust, and never visited the place again.

  The silent army of faceless gnomes who spent their working lives writing, interpreting, clarifying, and applying these millions of paragraphs of “thou shalts” and “thou shall nots” took on flesh and substance. They came in all sexes, shapes, and colors, each with his or her own coffee cup and a tiny circle of responsibility, which, no matter how small, of course overlapped with that of three or four others.

  The key players were all known to Jake’s staff: “Watch out for the Arachnid,” someone would say before a meeting. Or “Beware of the Sewer Rat. He’ll be there this morning.” “The Gatekeeper will grill you on this.” The staff named these key players in the procurement process because of their resemblance to the charac- ters in the game Dungeons and Dragons. When he returned from battle Jake had to contribute to the office lore by recounting the latest exploits of the evil ones.

  “It’s a miracle that the navy even owns a rowboat,” Grafton remarked one day to Admiral Dunedin.

  ‘True, but the Russians are more screwed up than we are. They manage every single sector of their economy like this, not just the military. You can’t even buy toilet paper in a store over there.”

  “The bureaucrat factor is a multiplier,” Jake decided. “The more people there are to do paperwork, the more paper there is to be worked and the slower everything goes, until finally the wheels stop dead and only the paper moves.”

  “The crap factor: it’s a law of physics,” Dunedin agreed.

  Jake took a briefcase full of unclassified material home every night, and after Callie and Amy were in bed he stayed awake until midnight scribbling notes, answering queries, and reading replies and reports prepared by his staff.

  He spent countless hours on the budget, trying to justify every dollar he needed for the next fiscal year. He had to make assump- tions about where the ATA program would be then, and then he had to justify the assumptions. Athena was still buried deep, out- side the normal budgetary process. Still he would need staff and travel money and all the rest of it. He involved everyone he could lay hands on and cajoled Admiral Dunedin into finding him two more officers and another yeoman. He didn’t have desks for them. They had to share.

  But things were being accomplished. A Request for Proposal (RFP) on the Athena project was drafted, chopped by everyone up and down the line, committeed and lawyered and redrafted twice and finally approved. Numbered copies went by courier to a half dozen major defense contractors who were believed to have the technical facilities and staff to handle development of a small superconducting computer for aviation use. The office staff had to be informed, and this had been done by the admiral.

  Inevitably the number of people who knew about Athena and what it could do was expanding exponentially. Access was still strictly need-to-know, but the system ensured that a great many people had the need, or could claim they did, citing chapter and verse of some regulation or directive no one else had ever read or even seen.

  Callie was understanding about the time demands Jake faced. She had spent enough years as a navy wife to know how the service worked. Amy was less so. She and Carrie were still going round and round, and she found Jake a pleasant change. He made rules and he enforced them, and he tucked her into bed every night. She wanted more of his time and he had precious little to give. The weekends became their special time together.

  “Why do you spend so much time at work. Jake?”

  “It’s my job. I have to.”

  ‘I’m not going to have a job Hke yours. I’m going to get a job that gives me plenty of time to spend with my little girl.”

  “Are you my little girl?”

  “No. I’m Amy. I’m not anybody’s little girl. But I’m going to have a little girl of my own someday.”

  “Do you ever think much about those somedays? What they’ll be like?”

  “Sure. I’ll have lots of money and lots of time and a very nice little girl to buy stuff for and spend time with.”

  “How are you going to get lots of money if you don’t spend much time earning it?”

  “I’m going to inherit it. From you and Callie.”

  “Guess we’d better work hard then.”

  One day in early May, Special Agent Lloyd Dreyfus made an ap- pointment to see Luis Camacho’s boss, P. R. Bigelow, without telling Camacho. He had thought about it for a week before he made the appointment with the secretary, and then he had two more days to wait Jumping the chain of command was as grievous a sin in the FBI as it was in the military, yet he had decided to do it anyway and to hell with what Camacho or anyone else thought. As the day and hour approached, however, the enormity of his trans- gression increased with each passing hour. Surely Bigelow would understand. Even if he didn’t, he must realize Dreyfus had a right and duty to voice his concerns.

  Dreyfus rehearsed his speech carefully. It wasn’t technically a speech: perhaps a better description would be “short, panicky monologue.” He had to justify himself as soon as he opened his mouth, get Bigelow’s sympathetic attention before he had a chance to start quoting the regulations, before he lost his cool and went ballistic. Was Bigelow a ballistic kind of guy? Dreyfus couldn’t recall Camacho ever saying.

  He tried to recall everything he had ever heard about P. R. Bigelow, and that wasn’t much. Strange, when you stopped to think about it Camacho never mentioned his superior officer, never said, “Bigelow wants this,” or “Bigelow is pleased,” or “Bigelow says blah-blah.” Come to think of it, Camacho never talked about anyone. If the Director himself told Luis Camacho to do thus and so, Camacho would just tell Dreyfus, “Do this” or “Do that.” He sometimes said what he hoped to find or achieve, but he never even hinted who had told him to cause something to happen, or why it was to happen. He never expressed a personal opinion. Curious as hell. Camacho was one weird duck, beyond a reasonable doubt.

  Sitting in Bigelow’s reception area with the secretary checking him out surreptitiously as she did her nails, Dreyfus went over his list one more time. He wanted everything right on the tip of his tongue. It would be worse than disastrous to think of the clincher on the way to the surgery in the dungeon. Once again he assured himself he was doing the right thing. The right thing. Doing the right thing. He fondled his pipe in his pocket as if it were a set of worry beads.

  The ten-button phone on the nail polisher’s desk buzzed to at- tract its owner’s attention. After listening a moment and grunting into the instrument in a pleasant, respectful way, she hung up and said to Dreyfus, “He’ll see you now.” Her painted eyebrows arched knowingly, condescendingly.

  P. R. Bigelow was eating a large jelly doughnut at his desk. He mumbled his greeting with his mouth full, a glob of red goo in the comer of his mouth.

  Dreyfus took a chair and launched into his prepared remarks. “I’ve asked for this time, sir, to ensure you know what is going on with investigation. The answer is almost nothing. For months now we’ve been spinning our wheels, begging computer time to try and crack X’s letters to the Soviet ambassa- dor, following a few people hither and yon all over Washington, monitoring some phone lines, wasting an army of manpower and bushels of money, and we are going essentially nowhere-I thought you should know that.”

  Bigelow wiped the jam from his lips with a napkin, sipped coffee from a white mug labeled “World’s Best Dad” and took anoth
er bite of doughnut.

  His attitude rattled Dreyfus, who got out his pipe and rubbed the bowl carefully. “Our best lead was a navy enlisted computer technician in the Pentagon, a guy we thought was tapping the computer for some of this stuff. Name of Terry Franklin. Yet Ca- macho never let us pick the guy up. So we sat and watched him do his little thing, and we were diligently following him, right on his tail, in March when his car blew up with him in it.”

  Bigelow finished the doughnut and used a moist finger to cap- ture and convey the last few crumbs to his mouth. Then he dabbed his Ups a final time and used two napkins to scrub the powdered sugar and flecks of jelly from his oak desk. He put this trash in the wastebasket and, sighing contentedly, rearranged his bottom in his chair.

  “And…?” said P. R. Bigelow.

  “A hit man wiped a walk-in witness to a drop with Franklin. Camacho talked to her a couple times, but she got eliminated be- fore we could get her to look at any photos. A professional hit. Two twenty-two caliber slugs in the skull. We’ve got the autopsy and lab reports and we’ve talked to neighbors up and down the street. We’ve got nothing at all. We’re absolutely dry on this one.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yes,” said Lloyd Dreyfus with an edge in his voice. He was beginning to lose his temper and didn’t care if it showed a little. “0ne of the staff officers in the navy’s ATA project — a Commander Judy — is trying to peddle classified inside info to interested defense contractors. We got interested in this officer when the project man- ager was murdered over in West Virginia one Friday evening in early February. That murder is unsolved — no one is doing any- thing on it — and Camacho doesn’t appear to be doing any follow- up on Judy’s contacts. He hasn’t even turned the file over to the fraud investigators or NIS. We know some of the people Judy’s talked to and…” Dreyfus threw up his hands in frustration.