The Minotaur

8

The plane carrying Jake and Helmut Fritsche landed at San Francisco International Airport, where the two men rented a car and ventured forth upon the free- ways. Fritsche drove since he had made this trip several dozen times.

“I guess a fair appraisal of Samuel Dodgers would include the word ‘crackpot,’” Fritsche said as they rolled south toward San Jose. “Also ‘religious fanatic,’ ’sports fanatic’ and a few more.”

Jake eyed Fritsche, with his graying beard and bushy eyebrows- “Crackpot?”

”Well, he’s a man of outrageous enthusiasms- Got a Ph.D. in physics from MIT in one of his prior incarnations, before he got religion or changed his name to that of his favorite baseball team. He grew up in Brooklyn, you know.”

“No,” said Jake Grafton through clenched teeth. “I didn’t.”

“Yeah. Anyway, he’s dabbled in computers and radar for years and patented this technology for suppressing reflected radiation. He came to me with some technical problems. I used my influence with the navy to get him a good radar to work with. Had it deliv- ered in a moving van.” He chuckled. “I’ll tell you that story some- time.”

“Henry says he’s a genius.”

Fritsche nodded Us agreement between drags on his cigar. Smoke filled the interior of the car. Jake cracked his window an inch to exhaust the thick fumes. “He’ll probably be in the running for a Nobel when his achievements get declassified.”

“Somebody said he’s greedy.”

“Samuel wants some bucks, all right. I can’t condemn him for that, not after a few years of reading about the pirates of Wall Street. Dodgers is the founder and only benefactor of his church and he wants to take it nationwide, with TV and radio and a hallelujah choir, the whole schmear. I think he realizes that since he’s so heavy into hellfire and damnation, contributions are going to be light. The feel-good, be-happy ministries are the ones rolling in the dough. Dodgers is going to have to keep his afloat out of his own pocket.”

Jake Orafton arranged the collar of his civilian jacket around his neck and lowered the window another inch. “What did George Ludlow say when he heard about Dr. Dodgers?”

“Amen,” Fritsche said lightly.

“I believe it,” Jake muttered. His companion tittered good-na- turedly.

The car rolled on into the farm district south of San Jose. Even- tually Fritsche turned up a dirt driveway and parked in front of a ramshackle wooden structure. A large sign amid the weeds pro- claimed: “Faith Apostolic Gospel Tabernacle.”

“I think we ought to get down on our knees inside and pray the GAO never gets wind of this,” Jake said as he surveyed the weeds and the fading whitewash on the old structure. The last coat of thin whitewash had been applied over a still legible Grange hall sign.

“You’ll see,” Fritsche assured him.

Samuel Dodgers was a stringy man in constant motion. He stood in the small, dusty chapel and tugged at this, gestured at that, reset the Dodgers baseball cap on his balding dome for the hundredth time, pulled at his trousers or ear or nose or lower lip, moving, always moving. “So you fellows wanta see it again, huh, and see what progress looks like in the late twentieth century? When do I get some money?”

“You got your last check two weeks ago.”

“I mean the next one.” He hitched up his pants and reset his cap and looked from face to face expectantly. The sunlight coming through a dirty windowpane fell on a long, lean face. His chin jutted outward from almost nonexistent lips. Above the grim mouth was a sharp nose and two restless black eyes. “The next check — when?”

“I think it’s a couple months away,” Fritsche replied gently.

“If I weren’t a Christian I’d cuss you government people. Your tax people squeeze the juice right out of a man — a man who’s sitting on the biggest advancement in military technology since the horseshoe — but the giving hand is so all-fired parsimonious, stingy, miserly. You people are just cheapl”

“You’re being paid according to the contract you agreed to. Dr. Dodgers.”

“Get a man over a barrel and squeeze him. It’s a sin to take advantage of a man trying to do the Lord’s work like I am. A sin.”

Jake glanced at Helmut Fritsche. He appeared unperturbed.

Dodgers led them between a dozen or so folding chairs toward the door near the altar. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammuni- tion,” Fritsche muttered just loud enough for Jake to hear above the tramping and scraping of heavy feet on the wooden floor.

The back half of the old Grange hall was a well-lit workshop. Several strings of naked hundred-watt bulbs were woven through the joists and cast their light on a crowded jumble of workbenches, tools and junk. The visitors picked their way through it behind Dodgers, who approached the only person in the place, a young roan of about twenty with carrot-red hair and acne to match.

“My boy Harold,” Dodgers said to Jake, who shook the offered hand and introduced himself- “Harold was at Stanford, but they weren’t teaching him anything, so he came back here to work with me. Learn more here with me than he would in that Sodom of little minds. Those fools with their calculators, always saying that some- thing won’t work…” He continued to fulminate as he opened the large doors at the back end of the building and began stringing electrical cords. “Well, Helmut, you seen this done before. Don’t just stand there like a tourist”

Dodgers drew Jake aside as Fritsche and Harold hooked up electrical cords and moved a workbench outside. “Okay.” He cleared his throat “Over there on that little bench below those trees” he pointed at the side of a hill about a half mile away—“is the radar. Harold will run that. That’s the radar the navy loaned me. Got it up there in an old two-holer that used to be here behind the tabernacle.” He stopped and showed Harold exactly how he wanted the power cables connected.

Jake joined him at a workbench. “Now this little radar suppres- sor — it picks up the incoming signal on these three antennas here and feeds it into this computer over there. Got four of the fastest chips made in this thing — Harold did most of the computer design. Computers are his bag. Little hobby of mine too. Anyway, the computer analyzes the incoming signal: strength, frequency, direc- tion, PRF — that’s Pulse Repetition Frequency — and so forth, and generates a signal that goes out through these companion antennas to muffle out future signals. That’s why these antennas are twins. You have a receiver and a transmitter.” “

“But you can’t suppress the first signal coming in?”

“Nope. They get one free look. The very first incoming pulse will not be muffled. Nor, in this generation of this device, will the second. See, you can’t get a pulse repetition frequency until you have received at least two pulses, which you must have to time your outgoing pulses, the muffling pulses. But with existing radars, the return from one pulse will be treated like static. The cathode- ray tubes need a lot more pulses than that.”

“And when the guy painting you stops transmitting, you beacon one more time?”

“That’s the problem Harold and I are working on right now- You see, after the first pulse comes in, and the second, the com- puter then has to figure it all out and start transmitting. Right now we’ve got the computing time down to about ten billionths of a second. That’s not enough of a clean chirp to let any existing radar get a definable return. If the next pulse doesn’t arrive right on time, we’ll stop the muffling pulses ten nanoseconds later. Just need to fix the software, the XY dipole and…” His voice fell to an incoherent mumble.

“Why wouldn’t a second radar that is in a receive-only mode see you beaconing to the first radar?”

“Bistatic radar? It would,” said the genius in jeans, “if all we were doing was pulsing straight back at the transmitter. But we aren’t. We’re pulsing from a series of antennas all over the plane to neutralize the reflected signal. Knowing how much to radiate, pre- cisely enough yet not too much, that’s where the computer really makes this thing work. First you must know the exact reflective characteristics of the object you are trying to protect — that’s your airplane — and put that data into the computer’s memory. Then the computer calculates the scatter characteristics of the incoming sig- nal and tells each of the two hundred transmitters positioned over the fuselage and wings and tail just bow much to radiate. All of the transmitters have to radiate in all directions. And this whole thing has to work very, very quickly. No computer was fast enough to handle this until superconductivity came along. See, to make the electrical signals move along fast enough to make this work, I’ve had to super-cool my computer in a tank of liquid hydrogen and encase the wires to each of die antennas in this special sheathing. That lowers the resistance just enough.” He gestured to a row of pressure bottles that stood in one corner of his workshop. “Still, there’s so much computing involved we had to go to a distributed system with multiple CPUs.”

Jake felt like a schoolboy who hadn’t done his homework. “But how does the outgoing radar signal cancel the incoming one?”

Dodgers stepped over to a blackboard standing in the corner. He looked around—“Where’s the rag?”—then used his shirt sleeve to erase a spot “Harold, where’s that blasted chalk?”

“Here, Dad.” The young man picked up a piece from a nearby bench.

Dr. Dodgers drew a sine wave on the board. “Do you know anything about radiation?” he asked Jake gruffly.

Jake nodded hesitantly as he traced a sine wave in the air with his finger. He knew from experience that claiming knowledge in the presence of a physicist was not a good idea.

“It moves in waves,” Dodgers agreed dubiously. He drew an- other sine wave over the first, yet the peaks of the second were where the valleys of the first one wera, and vice versa. “The first tine is the reflected signal. The second line is our outgoing signal. They cancel each other.”

Jake turned to Fritsche with raised eyebrows. Fritsche nodded affirmatively. “This principle has been known for a century. Dr. Dodgers’ real contribution — breakthrough — has been in the area of superconductivity at higher temperatures than anyone else has been able to achieve. So he asked himself what computer applica- tions were now possible that had been impossible before.”

“And came up with this one,” Jake muttered, for the first time seeing the intelligence and determination in that face under the bill of the cap.

“Let’s fire it up,” Dodgers suggested. “Helmut, if you will be good enough to take Captain Grafton and Harold up to the out- house, I’ll do the magic down here.”

As Harold drove the rental car along a dirt track through a field, Jake asked, “How’s security out here?”

“Security?” the young man said, his puzzlement showing. “The neighbors are all Presbyterians and Methodists and they think Dad’s a harmless loony. Their kids get curious and come around occasionally when they’re out of school or in the evenings, but we don’t tell them anything and they wander off after a while. Just got to keep them away when we’re radiating. Been having some trou- bles with the power company from time to time. We sure pull a lot of juice when we’re cooling down that hydrogen and they’ve dropped the load hereabouts a time or two.”

“We had the head of the Federal Power Commission call the president of Pacific Gas and Electric,” Fritsche told Jake.

“The district engineer still comes around occasionally, though,” Harold continued. “I think he’s harmless. Dad’s been feeding him a line about experimentation with electromagnetism, and he bought it ’cause he’s local and knows Dad’s a dingbat” The youngster goosed the accelerator to take them through a mudhole in the road. “Nice car. I’d sure like to have a car, but Dad — with the church and all…”

The radar was mounted in the old outhouse on the bench where the seats once were. It radiated right through the open door. Har- old Dodgers removed a padlock from a flap door at the back of the structure to gain access to the control panel and scope. “This is an Owl Screech radar,” Fritsche told Jake. “We borrowed it from the EW range at Fallen.” The Electronic Wufare range at NAS Fal- lon, Nevada, provided realistic training for fleet aircrews.

“Wonder where the U.S. Navy got this thing.” Owl Screech was a Soviet-made gunfire-control radar.

“From the Israelis, I think. They had a few to spare after the 1973 war.”

The drone of a jet somewhere overhead caused Jake to scan the blue sky. It was high, conning. An airliner or a bomber. A row of trees higher on die hill waved their leaves to the gentle breeze. So warm and pleasant here. Jake sat down in the grass while the redheaded youngster worked at the control panel and Helmut Fritsche observed.

“We’re not getting any power,” Harold announced. “Can I bor- row the car and run back to the shop?”

“Sure. You have the keys.” Harold eased the car around and went bumping down the dirt road. Fritsche joined Jake in the grass.

Jake tossed a pebble at the outhouse. The stone made a satisfying thunk. “What’s the plan to get this gizmo into production?”

“Normally we would do engineering drawings and blueprints and take bids, but due to the time constraints and secrecy require- ments, we’ll have to select a contractor on a cost-plus basis. The government will retain title to the technology and we’ll pay Dodg- ers royalties.”

“What contractor will get it?”

“One with the staff and manufacturing capacity to do it right and do it quickly. Probably an existing radar manufacturer.”

‘”Cost-plus. Isn’t that beltway French for ‘can’t lose’? And the contractor’s engineers will see all the technology and have a leg up on bids for second- and third-generation gear.”

“Yep.”

“And if they can dream up ways to do it better, they can get some patents of their own,” Jake tossed another pebble at the out- house. “Gonna be a nice little plum for somebody.”

“Yep.”

“Good thing all the guys in our shop are honest.”

Fritsche sat silently, weighing that remark, Jake supposed. “I guess our people are like everyone else,” Fritsche said at last, with- out inflection. “People are pretty generally alike all over.”

“Why was Strong killed?”

“Don’t know.”

“Any ideas?”

“Some. But I keep them to myself. I try not to gossip. There are laws against slander.”

Jake Grafton stood and brushed off the seat of his trousers. “A river of money flowing along in front of a bunch of guys on middle- class salaries, a bunch of guys all humping to keep their bills paid until they get middle-class pensions and form letters of apprecia- tion from the government. Everybody’s honest. Nobody’s tempted. Makes me want to salute the fucking flag and hum a march.” He looked down at Fritsche.

“I have no facts. Captain,” the scientist said. “None.”

Jake looked around, trying to think of something to say. He gave up and strolled up the hill to the trees, where he relieved himself. Somehow aboard ship things had been simpler, more clear. On his way back to the wooden building he saw the car returning with Harold at the wheel.

The redhead had the radar fired up in less than a minute. With Fritsche and Jake looking over his shoulder, he flipped switches. “This is its target-acquisition — its search — mode. And that blip right there is the tabernacle.” He pointed. Jake stared at the return a moment, then stepped a few paces to his right and looked around the shed at the scene. The radar in the shed made a variety of mechanical noises and he could hear the antenna banging back and forth against its stops. Now he referred again to the radar scope, which was American, not Soviet. Okay, there was the tabernacle, the house beyond and to the right, the trees on the left …

“Now,” said the young Dodgers, “step over there again and wave your arms at my dad. Then he’ll fire up the suppressor.” Jake did as requested and returned to the scope. Even as he watched, the blip that was the tabernacle faded from the screen, along with the ground return in the area beyond. Where the blip had been was merely a blank spot with no return at all.

“Try the frequency agility,” Fritsche suggested. Harold flipped another switch and then turned a dial. The tabernacle became faintly visible as a ghost image. “As he changes frequency on the Owl Screech, the computer on the suppressor is trying to keep up,” Fritsche explained to Jake, “so he sees this ghost image, which is not enough to lock on to. And remember, this is an American scope, more sensitive than Soviet scopes.”

“I’m impressed.”

“Go to a higher PRF and try to lock on the spot where we know the tabernacle is,” Fritsche said to Harold. ‘Try the expanded dis- play.”

Nothing. The radar failed to lock. The center of the presentation was an empty black spot.

After a long silence, Fritsche spoke softly, almost as if he were afraid of his own thoughts. “If we could implement this technique at optical wavelengths you wouldn’t even be able to see that build- ing down there with the naked eye.”

“You mean you could see right through it?”

“No, it would look like a black hole. Nothing would come back from it. But no one is going to have that kind of technology until well into the next century.”

“For heaven’s sake,” said a stunned Jake Grafton, “let’s just get the bugs worked out of this and get it to sea. That’s more than enough for you and me.”

The phone on Luis Camacho’s desk rang at noon on Tuesday as he was eating a tuna salad sandwich. He had mayonnaise on his fin- gers and managed to smear it on the telephone. “Camacho.” “Luis, this is Bob Pickering. Could you take a few minutes now and come down to my office? I have some folks here I would like you to meet.”

Camacho wrapped the half sandwich that remained and stuck it in his lower desk drawer, which he locked without thinking. Every drawer and cabinet in his office was always locked unless he was taking something out or putting something in. It was a habit.

Camacho knew Pickering, but not well. Pickering worked the District of Columbia and routinely handled walk-ins. “Luis, this is Mrs. Matilda Jackson and Mr. Ralph Barber. Luis Camacho.” As they shook hands, Pickering added, “Mr. Barber’s an attorney with Perguson and Waithe.” Ferguson and Waithe was one of the District’s larger firms, almost two hundred lawyers, and special- ized in federal regulatory matters.

Pickering summarized Mrs. Jackson’s adventures of the previous Friday evening while Camacho glanced at the visitors. He con- cluded, “Based on past experience, Mrs. Jackson felt that the Dis- trict police may not be sympathetic to a complaint from her, so she went to Mr. Barber, her former boss, yesterday, and he thought she should come see us.”

Barber was in his fifties, still wearing his topcoat and white silk scarf. Apparently he hoped this interview would be brief. Mrs. Jackson still had her coat around her too, but its faded cloth con- trasted sharply with the blue mohair that kept the spring winds from the lawyer’s plump frame.

“The neighborhood used to be someplace a person could be proud of,” Mrs. Jackson said slowly. “But those crack houses and dealers on the comers… The police have got to do something!”

“We felt that the information and evidence Mrs. Jackson has would probably receive a more dispassionate look from the FBI.” The counselor gestured toward the edge of Pickering’s desk, upon which lay a roll of film and a clear plastic Baggie containing a crumpled cigarette pack.

The Minotaur

“I thought you might want to send these to the lab,” Pickering told Luis. “I’ll do the report and send you a copy. We’ll get back to you in a few days, Mrs. Jackson. One of us will. Right now we need to get a set of your fingerprints to compare with whatever is on that cigarette pack. Just in case, you understand.”

Camacho jotted the report number on a piece of paper from Pickering’s desk, then excused himself. Curious about the two items he carried, he walked them straight to the lab and logged them in. Tomorrow afternoon, he was told. After three-

The Consolidated Technologies prototype had a hangar all to itself in Palmdale. As Jake stood and looked about the cavernous inte- rior, he was surrounded by engineers and vice presidents, at least twenty people all told. The vice presidents all wore business suits, but the engineers seemed fond of short-sleeved white shirts with dark ties. If that garb didn’t announce their profession, they all sported nerd buckets — plastic shirt-pocket protectors full of pens and pencils, from which dangled their building passes. Solar-pow- ered calculators rested in belt holsters on engineers and vice presi- dents alike.

The black airplane had a conventional dual nose wheel with the nose tow bar that enabled it to be launched by catapult, but that was about the only feature Jake found familiar. The rounded wings were situated well back on the fuselage and a canard protruded under each side of the canopy. Two vertical stabilizers canted in- board rose from the rear of the fuselage. The engine air intakes were on top of the plane, behind the cockpit, which seated two crewmen in tandem.

The senior vice president, a tall woman in her late forties whom Wilson had said rose from the accounting department to her pres- ent position on sheer raw talent, led the group toward the machine and explained major features to Jake. “The aircraft’s shape is opti- mized to reduce the aircraft’s Radar Cross Section. We’ve used radar-absorbent materials in all the leading and trailing edges— laminated layers of glass fiber and plastic with carbon coat- ing…”

“Uh-huh,” said Jake Grafton.

“For low frequencies that put the plane into the Rayleigh region, we’ve tried to lower the overall electromagnetic susceptibility… carbon-epoxy laminate for wing skin, coatings of multilayer ab- sorbers — mainly Schiff base salts and honeycomb composites. The goal was to reduce resonant microwave frequency scattering, mag- netic waves and even surface waves before they escape from the edges.”

“I see,” he lied. The canopy was open and the boarding ladder down, so Jake climbed up and peered into the forward cockpit- The control stick was a small vertical handle on the right side of the cockpit. Two power levers were installed on the left console. The forward panel contained two Multifunction Displays, MFDs, ar- ranged on either side of the control panel for a Heads-Up Display, a HUD, which sat on top of the forward panel so as he flew the pilot could look straight ahead through the tilted glass. Under the HUD control panel was another screen, similar to the MFDs, but without the frame of buttons that circled the upper two. All of the screens looked like eleven-inch color television screens with the power off: they were larger than the five-inch displays to which Jake was accustomed. But the weirdest thing — there were no en- gine instruments. Oh, the panel had a conventional gear lever, a standby gyro and even a G meter, but of engine instruments there were none.

“Go ahead. Climb in and sit down,” the woman urged. Jake glanced again at her name tag. Adele DeCrescentis.

“0kay.” As he arranged himself in the pilot’s seat, Ms. DeCrescentis mounted the ladder. “Where’s the ashtray?” he asked.

“Captain, I don’t think—“

“Sorry. Just kidding.” The look on her face implied that levity was inappropriate. Here in the high-tech cathedral, Jake thought Or the new-car showroom.

Down below, the entourage was making small talk among them- selves and casting many glances at the cockpit and vice president DeCrescentis, who probably didn’t look very vice presidential perched on the boarding ladder. “What’s going to happen to en- gine airflow in high-angle-of-attack maneuvers?”

“That was one of the trade-offs,” said DeCrescentis, shifting her weight gingerly. Even the medium heels she was wearing must be mighty uncomfortable on the rungs of that ladder. “Each intake has a flap that is raised hydraulically to funnel more air into the intake when the FCC — Flight Control Computer-senses an in- crease in G or angle of attack which correlates with a decrease in compressor inlet pressure, but those flaps can only do so much. The concept is angle-of-attack-limited, so it made sense to design to a five-G limit. That enabled us to lighten the airframe and in- crease the use of honeycomb composites, which made it even more stealthy. And we achieved better fuel economy.”

“I bet spins will be exciting.”

“The engines will compressor-stall in an upright spin and have to be shut down, but they can be restarted once a normal angle of attack is achieved. Inverted spins shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Hmmm.” Jake moved the control handle experimentally. It looked like the joystick for a computer game. “Fly by wire?”

“Of course.”

“Ms. DeCrescentis, I appreciate all you folks taking the time this morning to show me this plane, but what say I sort of look it over with my staff? They’ve been involved in this project for quite a while and no doubt can answer any questions I know enough to ask.”

“I suppose,” she said reluctantly, glancing again at the crowd below. She maneuvered her way down the ladder and two men below reached up to help her to the floor.

Fritsche scrambled up and seated himself on the cockpit coam- ing. Commander Rob Knight, the project coordinator, came up behind him and stood on the ladder. “What d’ya think?” Dr. Fritsche asked.

“Pretty stealthy, I guess.”

“About the same RCS as a bird.”

“How big a bird?”

“You aren’t impressed, are you?”

Jake Grafton took his time answering. He examined the panels on each side of the seat, then fingered the switches experimentally. “You guys tell me if I’m wrong: what we have here is one of the air force stealth-fighter prototypes, a version the blue-sky boys decided not to buy. It’s subsonic, shoots only smart weapons, has limited maneuverability and carries a nonstealthy belly tank for training purposes that can’t be carried in combat. Combat radius un- refueled is about six hundred nautical miles. Now, that is. To make this plane carrier-suitable it needs a beefed-up structure, tail-hook and folding wings, all of which will add at least a thousand pounds of weight — probably fifteen hundred pounds — and cost us speed and range- This killing machine will lighten Uncle Sugar’s wallet to the tune of about sixty-two million bucks a pop. If, and only if, it can be acquired on the most economic — the optimum — production schedule. Is that right?”

“Well, the cost factors are a lot more complicated than you’ve indicated, but your summary is fair.”

“Due to the likelihood that the five-G limit will be routinely exceeded by fleet aircrews in training situations, the design needs further modification to prevent compressor stalls. That involves more structural strengthening, computer-operated secondary intakes, loss of some stealthiness. That will cost an addi- tional…?”

“Five million a plane, assuming an optimum production sched- ule. Ten million more per plane if we buy new engines.”

“Five million a plane,” Jake continued. “And if we don’t buy that mod, we’ll have the compressor-stall problem that plagued the F-14 the first ten years of its life, which will mean a higher attrition rate than we would experience otherwise.” Attrition meant crashes, planes lost in training accidents. “Yet to go the new-engine route will take ten years because the engines don’t even exist; all we have is an engineers’ proposal saying they could build them sooner or later for about so many dollars apiece, subject to all the usual caveats about buy rates, research, inflation, etc.”

“Hiram Duquesne likes this plane.”

“Ah yes. Senator Duquesne, Another great American.”

“We didn’t get the senior vice president this morning because she likes your nose,” Knight shot back. “Consolidated has about two hundred million dollars of their own funds tied up in this prototype. They employ twenty thousand people. Consolidated is big business. They’ve bet their company on getting a stealth con- tract.”

“Yeah. Stock options and bonuses and company cars for the executives, jobs for the little people, and votes for the big people in Washington. I got the picture.”

“Don’t be so damned cynical,” Rob Knight said. “Listen, Jake, it may well come down to buying this plane to replace the A-6 or doing without. Ludlow and Royce Caplinger have to be goddamn sure they have the votes in Congress before they go up to Capitol Hill with their hats in their hands.”

“That’s their problem, not mine. I’m just a worn-out, washed-up attack pilot. I didn’t understand two words that DeCrescentis woman said.” He twiddled some knobs. “I didn’t ask for this job,” he roared. “I’m not going to be responsible for whether twenty thousand people keep their jobs! Don’t lay that crap on me!”

Knight retreated down the ladder. Fritsche followed, his face averted. Jake sat alone in the cockpit. He tried to imagine how this plane would feel to fly. With his right arm in the rest and his hand on the stick and his left curved over the throttles, he thought about how it would feel to look through the HUD at a Soviet ship. This plane had to be able to take on Soviet ships in the Med and the Indian Ocean and the Arctic in winter. But it also had to be able to fight in brushfire wars in places like Lebanon and North Africa, Afghanistan, Iran, Korea, Vietnam. Maybe China. Could it? With million-dollar missiles and a five-G restriction?

When he had recovered his temper, he motioned to Knight and Fritsche, who ascended the ladder again. “What would Sam Dodg- ers’ gizmo do for this plane?”

“Lower the RCS from a bird to a June bug.” Fritsche frowned. “It’s so stealthy now that making it more so wouldn’t be cost- effective, at least not in the lifetime of this machine. That’s just my opinion, of course.”

“On the other hand,” Knight said, “this plane wouldn’t be junk if Dodgers’ suppressor can’t be made to work in a real airplane. Dodgers knows the reflective characteristics of that tabernacle wall precisely when viewed from the old outhouse by one radar. Pro- tecting a shape as complex as an aircraft from numerous transmit- ters and God knows how many receivers situated in ail three di- mensions — that’s another thing altogether.”

“Tell me what all this stuff is,” Jake said. “This doesn’t look like any cockpit I ever saw.”

“Both prototypes have exactly the same layout. This is all the stuff that was going into the A-6G. What these television-screen things are are Multifunction Displays. This lower middle one is a map that moves as the plane moves. The plane always stays in the center. This should do away with the necessity for the crew to always carry awkward charts in the cockpit.

“Now these upper two MFDs present literally all the informa- tion the pilot might wish to know, or the info can be presented on the HUD. A touch of the button calls up engine information, an- other button calls up the radar presentation from the rear cockpit, still another the presentation from either one of the two IR sensors, and so on. Then there’s a variety of tactical displays…” He droned on.

Jake was astounded. This was several generations beyond the A-6 cockpit. It was technically as far beyond an A-6 as an A-6 was from a World War II B-17. “I had no idea,” he muttered, awed.

Knight showed him the rear cockpit. It was equally futuristic. Instead of the HUD control panel, it possessed a third MFD, so three of them were arranged in a row right across the panel. Under the center one was the map display. “This moving map — didn’t James Bond have one like this in one of the movies?”

“Yep. But this is better.”

“Mamma Mia!”

The BN in an A-6 had one cursor control stick. The BN in this plane had two, one on each side panel, and instead of just a couple of buttons sticking out, each stick was festooned with buttons, like warts. “The idea is that the BN won’t have to reach for controls. Everything he needs is on those control sticks.”

After Jake spent another half hour walking around the airplane and looking at every inch, he asked each of the commanders what they thought. One complained about range and payload, another about the intake problems, a third about the difficulty of mainte- nance. All were aghast at the cost. “But five years from now we’ll all probably think sixty-two million dollars for a plane was a hell of a buy,” Smoke Judy commented.

“You know,” Jake said later as he stood in the doorway with Helmut Fritsche and looked back at the all-black airplane, “I had an uncle who went to the car dealer one morning to buy a station wagon for the family, and that evening he went home with a little red convertible coupe.”

“High tech is sexy.”

Jake thought about it. “It’s so damn neat that you try to con- vince yourself that you need it. All the bells and whistles and doohickeys and thingamajigs. And the day you have to bet your ass on these gadgets, they don’t work,”

“Shapes and absorbers work.”

“I suppose. But how is Sam Dodgers’ superconductive computer with multiple CPUs going to work after five hundred catapult shots and five hundred arrested landings when some kid racks the plane through a six-G pull to evade an optically aimed missile? How are all these MFDs and IR sensors and ring-laser gyros going to hold up? Is this techno-junk gonna work then?”