The Minotaur jg-3 Page 35

  Every shady circle under the mall trees was home to office work- ers and tourists who could no longer stay on their feet. Children sprawled and played on the hard-packed dirt. The grass that had grown under the trees so profusely this spring had succumbed weeks ago under the impact of infinite feet. An endless stream of joggers and serious runners pounded up and down the gravel paths of the mall, little dust spurts rising from the thud of each foot The combined effect was a thin brown curtain of dust that rose into the air and tilted away toward the monolithic art museums that lined the northern side of the open expanse.

  The street in front of the Air and Space Museum was bumper to bumper with tour buses. As he came closer, Luis Camacho threaded his way through the hordes of teenagers and middle-aged pink people in shorts and cutesy T-shirts.

  The great American sightseeing excursion was in full swing. Herds of Japanese tourists clad in the requisite button-down short- sleeved shirts clustered near some of the buses and busily snapped their cameras at each other, the huge windowless museums to the north, the distant Washington Monument and the dome of the Capitol rising in the east like a corpulent moon. In spite of the oppressive heat, the mood was cheerful, gay.

  Camacho found a spot in the shade near a tree and sat down gratefully. Cigarette butts and candy-bar wrappers littered the ground. He didn’t care. To his left a souvenir stand was doing a land-office business in film, soft drinks and ice-cream bars. Squall- ing youngsters and frisky youths queued like soldiers in the sun as they waited for their turn to surrender their money to the happy merchant.

  Derelicts shuffled slowly through the human forest. They were blithely ignored as they mined the trash bins for pop cans. A cou- ple of alkies snoozed further away from the street in the shade cast by the treetops, out where the grass still survived: their day had apparently ended some hours ago when the critical intoxication level had been reached and surpassed.

  He had been there no more than five minutes when he spotted the man he had come to meet feeling his way through the crowd, looking about him. Camacho stood and walked toward him.

  “Morning, Admiral.”

  “Let’s get the hell out of this crowd,” Tyler Henry growled.

  “Next time pick a quieter spot.” Henry was clad in beige slacks and a yellow pullover with a little fox on the right breast. His eyes were hidden behind the naval aviator’s de rigueur sunglasses.

  “Aye aye, sir.”

  The two men walked east, toward the duck pond at the base of Capitol Hill. When they were out of earshot of the tourists and drunks. Henry said, “Okay. I haven’t got much time today. What d’ya want?”

  “We intercepted another letter from X this morning. Thought you’d be interested. Here’s the coded message it con- tained.” The FBI agent passed him the little square of words with the three words penciled on it.

  Admiral Henry stopped dead and stared at the words on the paper. “Kilderkin. Holy rock! The damned Minotaur is giving away Athena!”

  “Yes.”

  “Awww, goddamn! Awww…”

  Camacho gingerly removed the paper from the admiral’s fingers, refolded it and put it in his pocket.

  “And I suppose you assholes with badges just stuffed the fucking letter back in the envelope and gave it to the postman?” When he saw Camacho’s silent nod, Henry scuffed angrily at the dirt. He indulged himself in some heavy cussing.

  “Do you know what Athena is? Do you silly half-wit peepers have any idea what the hell Athena is all about?”

  “Will, you said—“

  “I know what I told you! I’m asking if any of your superiors have even the slightest glimmer how valuable Athena is.”

  “I don’t know.”

  The admiral gestured hugely in exasperation. “Just what in the name of God is going on, Luis?”

  They had reached the edge of the duck pond. Camacho stood with folded arms and gazed across the placid surface, past the statue of U.S. Grant on horseback, at the imposing edifice of the Capitol building. “I can only guess,” he said softly.

  “But do they have any idea what Athena is — just what the hell they are giving away?”

  “I don’t know what they know.”

  “This isn’t fiber optics, or ring laser gyros, or any of that other magic shit they’ve been letting cart out of the vault Athena is the Hope Diamond, the mother lode, the most precious, priceless treasure in the vault. Do those stupid, ignorant incompe- tent half-wit political pimps have even the faintest glimmer what it is Just laid his filthy hands OB?

  “I don’t know!”

  “Athena will make radar obsolete. Inevitably it will become cheaper and well be able to miniaturize if get it so small and cheap we can use it to hide tanks and jeeps, not just ships and airplanes. We can hide satellites with it. In ten years or so we can probably hide submarines with it. Athena will revolutionize strat- egy, tactics, weaponry. And we’ve got it! The Russians don’ti Yetl If we can keep them from getting it for just a couple years — just a couple years — I tell you, Luis, Athena will give America such a huge technological edge that war will become a political and mili- tary impossibility. War will be impossible!”

  “I believe you.”

  “Then why? Tell me that! Why?”

  Camacho shrugged.

  “What could be so goddamn valuable that they would bet the ranch, the nation, the future of mankind?”

  “I don’t know for sure, and I couldn’t tell you if I did.”

  The admiral exploded. Thirty-some years in the navy had really taught him how to swear. Camacho didn’t think he had ever heard such a virtuoso performance,

  Finally Henry stopped spluttering. Bitterness had replaced his exasperation. “I think there’s some treason going on over in your shop, Camacho. That’s all it could be.”

  “Better go easy with that word.”

  “Treason.” Henry spit it out “Don’t like it, huh? By God, if Congress gets hold of this, that may be the kindest word those slimy spook bastards ever hear. People will go to prison over this. You wait and see.”

  Camacho lost his temper. “I showed you that piece of paper so you could take some reasonable steps to protect Athena, you swab- bie,” he snarled. “Like change the code or empty the file. Not so you could shoot your mouth off about things you know nothing about, things that will ruin you and me. Now I’ve heard all the crap from you that I’m gonna listen to. I’ve heard enough. One more crack out of line and I’ll come get you with a national secu- rity warrant and you can sit in a padded cell at St. Elizabeth’s until I think it’s safe to let you out. That may be when you’re a corpse. Is that what you want?”

  “No,” said Tyler Henry contritely, aware that he had gone too far.

  “Just one word. Admiral, just one little slip by you, and I’ll come after you with that goddamn warrant. You’d better believe I will. You and John Hinckley can spend your declining years together.”

  Camacho wheeled and walked away, leaving Henry standing there staring at his retreating back.

  22

  Tyler Henry accompanied the ATA project crew when they returned to Tonopah in July. The admiral shook hands with the TRX engineers and spent three hours inspecting the plane, which occupied the hangar where the Consolidated bird had rested, and asking questions. At his request Rita Moravia and Toad Tarkington remained beside him. Many of his questions were directed at Rita, but when he wanted to know something about the navigation/attack system, he asked Toad.

  “Is that right, Franks?” the admiral growled at the TRX pro- gram manager after he had listened carefully to one of Toad’s answers.

  Harry Prank nodded his assent. It looked to Jake as if Franks had lost ten pounds or so, but the cotton of his colorful sport shirt still seemed loaded near its tensile strength where it stretched over his middle. Franks rolled the stump of a dead cigar from one cor- ner of his mouth to the other and winked at Jake.

  With his shoulders thrown back and his genial air of self-assur- ance and c
ommand. Franks reminded Jake of the salty chief petty officers he had grown to respect and admire when he was a junior officer. Franks certainly was no modern naval officer or chief in mufti, not with that gut. In today’s navy even the chief petty of- ficers were slimmed down or retired, victims of rigid weight stan- dards enforced with awesome zeal. The senior admirals liked to think of their service as a lean, mean fighting machine, which of course it was not. More accurately, the navy was a host of skinny technocrats. Not only were most sailors technicians, most of the officers spent the vast majority of their professional lives as admin- istrators, experts on instructions, notices, regulations, and budgets. The bureaucracy was mean but certainly not lean.

  Confusing, Jake mused, glancing once again at Franks’s portico, very confusing.

  Unlike the trendy and not so trendy humans who stood admir- ing it, TRX’s prototype was exquisite functionality. The mission was all-weather attack. The plane would be launched from the deck of an aircraft carrier, in any weather day or night, to pene- trate the enemy’s defenses, find and destroy the target without outside aid, and return to the tiny ship in the vast ocean from whence it came, there to be refueled and rearmed and launched again. Every form and feature had been carefully crafted for the rigid demands of this mission, and no other.

  As he stood listening to the engineers describe their creation, Jake Grafton’s eye fell on Rita Moravia and Toad Taridngton, two intelligent young people in perfect health with good educations. They and others like them would have to use this machine as a weapon, when and if. The technocrats would build it and take it to sea. Yet the plane would never be anything but a cunning collec- tion of glue, diodes, and weird alloys. The attack must come from the hearts of those who rode it down the catapult into the sky.

  The important things in war never change. As always, victory would go to those who prepared wisely, planned well, and drove home their thrusts with a grim, fierce determination.

  When the F-14 chase plane was safely airborne, Rita Moravia smoothly advanced the throttles to the stops and let the two im- proved F404 engines wind up to full power as she checked the trim setting one more time. The cockpit noise level was higher than in the Consolidated plane, and no doubt the roar of the engines out- side was also louder. The exhausts had not been as deeply inset above the wing and cooled as extensively with bypass air from the compressors; consequently more of the engine’s rated power was available to propel the plane through the atmosphere. And the noise was not the only clue: she could feel slightly more vibration and a perceptibly greater dip of the nose as the thrust of the screaming engines compressed the nose-gear oleo. “Anytime you’re ready,” Toad announced.

  After dictating all the engine data onto the audio recorder wired into the ICS, Rita released the brakes. The nose oleo rebounded and the plane rolled smartly, picking up speed.

  The little thumps and bumps as the wheels crossed the expan- sion joints in the concrete runway came quicker and quicker. The needle on the airspeed indicator came off the peg. On the holo- graphic Heads-Up Display — the HUD — functioning in this proto- type, the symbology came alive. The sound of the engines dropped in volume and pitch as the machine accelerated.

  Now the weight came off the nose wheel as the stabilator and living wing controls took effect and began to exert aerodynamic force on the nose, trying to lift it from the runway. Oh yes. With the joystick held ever so lightly in her fingers, she felt the nose wheel bobble, skip lightly, then rise from the concrete as the wings gripped the air.

  The master warning light illuminated — bright yellow — and be- side the HUD the right engine fire warning light — brilliant blood red.

  She smoothly pulled both throttles to idle, then secured the right one. Nose held off until the main mounts were firmly planted, decelerating nicely, speed brakes and flaperon pop-up deployed, five thousand feet of concrete remaining, slowing…

  “Ginger aborting,” she broadcast on the radio. “Fire light, right engine, roll the truck.”

  Nose wheel firmly on the concrete, Rita applied the brakes with a firm, steady pressure. She rolled to a stop and killed the remain- ing engine as she opened the canopy. The fire truck charged to- ward them.

  Rita pulled her helmet off. “Any fire?” she shouted at the man on the truck as the engine noise died. Without conscious effort, her fingers danced across the panels turning off everything.

  “Not that we can see.”

  “Let’s get out anyway,” Rita told Toad, who had already tog- gled his quick-release fittings and was craning out of the rear cock- pit, looking for smoke.

  Standing beside the runway, perspiring profusely as the summer desert sun cooked them, Rita and Toad heard the news five min- utes later from Harry Pranks. A swarm of technicians already had the engine bay doors open. “Electrical problem, I’m sure. We’ll tow it into the hangar and check it out. Nice abort,” he added with a nod at Rita. “You two want to ride back in the van? It’s air- conditioned.”

  “Yep,” said Tarkington. “Nothing like air force hospitality.”

  They flew the plane for the first time the following day. Rita came back from the flight with a large smile on her face. “Captain,” she told Jake Grafton as she brushed sweat-soaked hair from her fore- head and eyes, “that’s one sweet machine. Power, handling, plenty of G available, sweet and honest. A very nice airplane.”

  Before Harry Franks’ grin could get too wide. she started detail- ing problems: “Controls are oversensitive. Twitchy. Flying the ball is a real challenge. The left generator dropped off the line twice, which was maybe a good thing, because we found the power relay works as advertised; the inertial stayed up and humming. Toad got the computer running again without any problem each time. And the rudder trim…”

  When Rita paused for air. Toad chimed in. “I’d like to go over how those fiber optic data buses work with someone, one more time. I’m still trying to figure out how…”

  The routine was exactly like it had been a month before. Teleme- try, videotapes and the Flight Data Recorder info were carefully reviewed and the data compiled for a later in-depth analysis. Those problems that could be fixed were, and major problems were care- fully delineated for factory study.

  Jake Grafton demanded all his people quit work at 9 P.M. He wanted them rested and back at the hangar at six each morning. Harry Franks worked his technicians around the clock in shifts, although he himself put in eighteen-hour days and was on call at night.

  Toad tried to get out of the hangar as often as possible. The air force was using this field for stealth fighters — F-117s — and several other low-observable prototypes, including the B-2. Every so often if he was outside he would hear a rumble and there, before his very eyes, would be some exotic shape that seemed to defy the laws of gravity and common sense as it cleaved the hot blue desert air. He felt vaguely guilty, and slightly naughty. To satisfy his idle curios- ity he was seeing something that the Powers That Be — Those Who Knew — the Appointed, Anointed Keepers of the Secret — didn’t think his little mind should be burdened with. So he stood and gawked, curious and mystified, a little boy at the knothole, watch- ing the love rites of the groping teenagers. He would go back to work shaking his head and trot outside again, hopefully, several hours later.

  He bumped into Jake Grafton on one of these excursions. The captain stood with his hands in his pockets watching a pair of F-117s come into the break.

  “Amazing, huh?” Jake said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I’ve been flying for twenty-five years,” Grafton said, “and read- ing everything I could about planes for ten more. And all this time I never even dreamed…”

  “I know what you mean. It’s like science and technology have gone crazy in some kind of souped-up hothouse. The technology is breeding, and we don’t recognize the offspring.”

  “And it’s not just one technical field. It’s airframes and engines, composites and glues, fabricating techniques, Computer-Assisted Design, avioni
cs and computers and lasers and radars. It’s every- thing! In five years everything I learned in a lifetime will be obso- lete.”

  Or less than five years, Jake told himself glumly as the bat- winged B-2 drifted quietly overhead. Maybe everything I know is obsolete now.

  When Toad Tarkington thought about it afterwards, he remem- bered the sun. It was one of those little details you notice at the time and don’t think about, yet remember later.

  He had seen the sun many times before in the cockpit, bright and warm and bathing everything in a brilliant, clean light, its beams darting and dancing across the cockpit as the plane turned and climbed and dived. A clean light, bright, oh so bright, warm- ing bodies encased in Nomex and sweating inside helmets and gloves and flying boots. This was part of flying, and after a while you didn’t notice it anymore. Yet for a few seconds that morning he did notice it The memory of it stayed with him, and somehow, looking back, it seemed important

  He was deep into the mysteries of the radar and computer and how they talked to each other, acutely aware of how little time aloft he had. The radar’s picture was automatically recorded on videotape, but he muttered into the ICS — the audio track of the tape — like a voodoo priest so he would know later just what the gain and brightness had been for each particular presentation. He worked fast. These flights were grotesquely short.

  Rita concentrated on flying the plane, on keeping it precisely on speed and on altitude, exactly where the test profile required. She was extraordinarily good at this type of flying. Toad had discov- ered. She had the knack. It required skill, patience and self-disci- pline as one concentrated on the task at hand to the exclusion of everything else, all qualities Rita Moravia possessed in abundance. The airspeed needle stayed glued on the proper number and all the other needles did precisely what they were supposed to, almost as if they were slaves to Rita’s iron will.