The Minotaur

20

Through the years Jake Grafton had become a connoisseur of air force bases. Visiting one was like driving through Newport or Beverly Hills. With manicured lawns, trimmed trees, well-kept substantial buildings and nifty painted signs, air force bases made him fed like a poor farm boy visiting the estate of a rich uncle. In contrast, the money the admirals wheedled from a parsimonious Congress went into ships and air- planes. The dedication of a new cinder-block enlisted quarters at some cramped navy base in the industrial district of a major port city was such a rare event that it would draw a half dozen admirals and maybe the CNO.

The Tonopah facility, however, didn’t look like any air force base Jake had ever seen. It looked like some shacky, jerry-built temporary facility the navy had stuck out in the middle of nowhere during World War II and had only now decided to improve. Per- haps this base was just too new. Bulldozers and carthmovere sat scattered around on large, open wounds of raw earth. No trees or grass yet, though two trenchers appeared to be excavating for a sprinkler system. When the wind blew, great clouds of dust embed- ded with tumbleweeds swept across the flat, featureless desert and through the stark frames of buildings under construction, and the wind blew most of the time.

Security was as tight as Jake had ever seen it in the military. Air policemen in natty uniforms with white dickeys at their throats manned the gates and patrolled chain link fences topped with barbed wire while they fought to keep their spifiy blue berets in place against the wind. The fences were woven with metal strips to form opaque barriers. Signs every few yards forbade stopping or photography. You needed a pass to enter any area, and prominent signs vibrating in the wind advised you of that fact

The place reeked with that peculiar aroma of government in- trigue: Important, stupendous things are happening here. You don’t want to know! We who do also know that you couldn’t handle it. Trust us. In other words, the overall effect was precisely the same gray ambience of don’t-bother-us superiority that oozes from large post offices and the mausoleums that house the departments of motor vehicles, social services, and similar enterprises throughout the land.

Even the sergeant at the desk of the Visiting Officers’ Quarters wanted to see Jake Grafton’s security documents. He made cryptic notations in a battered green logbook and passed them back with- out comment as he frowned at Helmut Fritsche’s facial hair. After all, didn’t Lenin wear a beard?

As he escorted Jake and Fritsche down the hall toward their rooms. Toad Tarkington said, ‘This place is really dead. Captain. The nearest whorehouse is fifty miles-away.”

Fritsche groaned.

“Tonopah makes China Lake look like Paris after dark,” Tar- kington told the physicist with relish. “This is as far as you can get away from civilization without starting out the other side.” He lowered his voice. “There’s spies everywhere. The place is crawling with ‘em. Watch your mouth. Remember, loose lips sink—“

“Loose lips sink lieutenants,” Jake Grafton rumbled.

“Yessir, them too,” Toad chirped.

That evening Jake inspected the Consolidated Technologies air- plane. Under the bright lights of the cavernous hangar, it was being tended by a small army of engineers and technicians who were busy checking every system, every wire, every screw and boh and rivet Adele DeCrescentis watched a man fill in a checklist. Each item was carefully marked when completed. Rita Moravia walked back and forth around the aircraft, looking, probing, asking more questions of the company test pilot who stood beside her. Toad Tarkington was in the aft cockpit, going over the radar and coro- puter one more time as a nearby yellow cart supplied electrical power and cooling air.

At 9 P.M. they gathered in a large ready room on the second deck of the hangar’s office pod. The room was devoid of furnish- ings except for one portable blackboard and thirty or so folding chairs.

The meeting lasted until midnight Every aspect of tomorrow’s flight was gone over in detail Consolidated’s people approved the test profile and agreed on the performance envelope Rita would have to stay within on the first flight The route of the flight was laid out on a large map which was posted on one wall and briefed by Commander Les Richards. He pointed out the places where ground cameras would be posted. Real-time telemetry from the airplane would be supervised by Commander Dalton Harris. Smoke Judy would fly the chase plane, an F-14 borrowed from NAS Miramar, and a carefully briefed RIO would fihn the Consol- idated prototype in flight from the F-14’s backseat

After the meeting broke up, Jake Grafton spent another thirty minutes with his staff, then went down to the hangar deck. Only a dozen or so technicians were still on the job.

The overhead floods made little gleaming pinpoints where they reflected on the black surface of the Consolidated stealth plane. As he walked, the tiny pinpoints moved along the complex curved surfaces in an unpredictable way. With his face only a foot or so from the skin of the plane, he studied it The dark material seemed to have an infinite depth, or perhaps it was only his imagination.

The outer skin, he knew, was made of a composite that was virtually transparent to radar waves. Underneath, carrying the stresses, was a honeycomb radar-absorbent structure made of syn- thetic material formed into small hexagonal chambers. The honey- comb was bonded to inner skins of graphite and other strong com- posites. He touched the airplane’s skin. Smooth and cool.

No wonder the Consolidated people were so proud of their creation.

But how would it hold up aboard a ship? Could it stand the rough handling and sea air and the poundings of cat shots and traps? Thousands of them? Would it be easy to fly, within the capabilities of the average pilot — not just a superbly trained, gifted professional like Rita Moravia, but the average bright lad from Moline or Miami with only three hundred hours of flight time who would have to learn to use this Art Deco sculpture as a weapon?

Five nights. He needed a lot of answers in just a short time. Rita and Toad would have to get them.

He walked away musing about Rita’s lack of test experience and wondering if he had made a mistake giving her this ride.

Tomorrow. He would know then.

But the following day problems with the telemetry equipment kept the prototype firmly on the ground. The engineers were still labor- ing in the sun on a concrete mat where the temperature exceeded a hundred and ten when Jake glanced at his watch and ordered the plane towed back into the hangar. The Soviet satellite would soon be overhead. The hangar’s interior was shady and cool. And since the air force owned it, it was air-conditioned.

The next morning, Wednesday, the F-14 took off with a cracking roar that seemed to split the desert apart. Smoke Judy pulled the power off when he was safely airborne and made a dirty turn to the downwind leg. He came drifting down toward the earth paralleling the runway and stabilized at one hundred feet just as Rita began to roll.

The prototype was noticeably quieter, so quiet that its noise was barely audible above the howl of the Tomcafs engines as Smoke used his throttles to hang the heavy fighter just above the runway as the stealth bird accelerated. When Rita lifted off and retracted her gear. Smoke added power to stay with her and the sound of the stealth plane was entirely muflled.

“Damn quiet,” George Witeon remarked. “About like a Booing 767, maybe less.” The low noise level was a direct by-product of burying the exhaust nozzles and tailpipes in the fuselage, shielded from the underside, to reduce the plane’s infrared signature.

In the cockpit Rita concentrated on maintaining the selected test profile and getting the feel of the controls. She had spent hours sitting in the cockpit the last few weeks memorizing the position of every switch, knob, and gauge, learning which buttons she needed to press to place information where she wanted it on (he MFDa, and so even now, minutes into her first flight in the plane, it was familiar.

In the backseat Toad was busy with the system. He checked the inertial; it seemed okay. With ring laser gyros, it had not a single moving part and was more accurate than any conventional inertial using electromechanical gyros. It would need to be. To keep the stealth plane hidden, it would be necessary to fly with the radar off most of the time, and the ring laser inertial would have to keep a very accurate running tally of the plane’s position.

The computer was also functioning perfectly. He had encoded the waypoint and checkpoint information onto optical-electronic— optronic — cards on the ground and loaded them into the compufer after engine start. The two-million-dollar pocket calculator, he called it. It hummed right along, belching readouts of airspeed, groundspeed, altitude, wind direction and velocity, true course, magnetic course, drift angle, time to go to checkpoint, etc., over fifteen readouts simultaneously. He had this information on the right-hand MFD, roughly the location on the panel where it would be in an A-6E.

Some of the displays were not yet hooked up since development work was not yet complete. Consequently the three-dimensional information presentations on the pilot’s holographic Heads-Up Display could not be tested.

The phased-array radar in the nose received Toad’s attention next. The antenna was flat and fixed, it did not rotate or move. Actually it was made up of several hundred miniature antennas, individually varying their pulse frequencies to steer or focus the main beam. A conventional radar dish would have acted as a re- flector to send the enemy’s radar signals back to him. Toad tuned the radar to optimize the presentation and dictated his switch and dial positions on the ICS, which, like the radar presentation, was being recorded on tape for later study.

The next major pieces of gear he turned on and integrated into the system were, for him, the most interesting. Two new infrared search and tracking systems that were able to distinguish major targets as far away as a hundred miles, depending upon the air- craft’s altitude and the relative heat value of the target. One could be used for searching for enemy fighters while the other was used to navigate or locate a target on the ground. The range of these sensors was a tenfold improvement over the relatively primitive IR gear in the A-6E. Since a stealthy attack plane would fly most of its mission with its radar off, these new gizmos would literally be the eyes of the bombardier-navigator.

Toad took a second to glance to his left. Smoke had the F-14 about a hundred feet away in perfect formation. The backseater’s helmet was hidden behind his camera, which was pointed this way.

That videotape would show every twitch of the flight control sur- faces- Toad turned back to the task at hand.

He felt the plane yawing as Rita experimented with the controls and advanced and retarded each throttle independently. She was talking on the radio, telling Smoke what she was doing, reading the engine performance data to the people on the ground so it could be coordinated with the telemetry data, giving her impressions of the feel of the plane.

”Seems responsive and sensitive in all axes,” she said. “Engine response is good, automatic systems functioning as advertised, a hundred feet a minute more climb than I expected. Fuel flow fifty pounds per hour high. Oil pressure in the green, exhaust gas temps are a hundred high. I like it. A nice plane.”

She leveled the plane at Plight Level 240 at.72 Mach, 420 knots true. Toad checked the range and depression angles of the radar and IR sensors, and ran checks on the inertial and computer.

Thirty minutes later, after hitting three navigation checkpoints, Rita dropped the nose two degrees and began a power-on descent back toward Tonopah. She leveled at 5,000 feet at 550 knots and raced toward the field. Smoke Judy was a hundred feet away on the right side, immobile in relation to the stealth bird.

In the backseat Toad ran an attack. His target was the hangar that had housed the plane. The system gave Rita steering and time and distance to go to a laser-guided bomb release. Everything func- tioned as advertised. No weapon was released because the plane carried none, but a tone sounded on the radio and was captured on all the tapes, and it ceased abruptly at the weapons-release point, interrupted by the electronic pulse to the empty bomb rack cun- ningly faired into the airplane’s belly.

After three attacks at different altitudes, Rita slowed the plane with speed brakes and dropped the gear and flaps. She entered the landing pattern.

Two fleet Landing Signal Officers that Jake had borrowed from Miramar — they had flown the F-14 to Tonopah — stood on the end of the runway in a portable radio-equipped trailer that a truck had delivered. They had spent the last three days painting the outline of a carrier deck on the air force’s main runway and rigging a porta- ble Optical Landing System — OLS — which the truck had also de- livered. Now they watched Rita make simulated carrier ap- proaches flying the ball, the “meatball,” on the OLS. Jake Grafton stood beside them.

“Paddles has you,” the senior man told Rita as she passed the ninety-degree position. One other LSO wrote while the first watched the approach with the radiotelephone transceiver held to his ear and dictated his comments.

“0n speed, little lined up left, little too much power…” The plane swept past and its wheels whacked into the runway, right on the line that marked the target touchdown point. The nose wheel smacked down and the engines roared and Rita flew it off the runway. The LSO shouted to his writer, ‘One pass.”

Jake Grafton stared at the plane in the pattern. It just looks weird, he told himself The lifting fuselage and invisible intakes and the canards and the black color, it didn’t look like a real airplane. Then he knew. It looked like a model It looked like one of those plastic planes he had glued together and held at arm’s length and marveled at.

“You’re carrying too much power in the groove,” the LSO told Rita after the second pass.

“I’m just floating down with the power way back,” she replied. “And we’re hearing a little rumble. Maybe incipient compressor stall. I’ll use the boards next time around.”

The Consolidated engineers had thought the speed brakes would be unnecessary in the pattern. Yet with the intakes on top of the plane, behind the cockpit, maybe the air reaching them was too turbulent when the plane was all cocked up in the landing configu- ration. Jake Grafton began to chew on his lower lip. The air force doesn’t land planes like this, he reminded himself. They wouldn’t have tried these maneuvers when they flew the plane.

With the boards out the plane approached at a slightly higher nose attitude, its engine noise louder. The speed brakes allowed— required — Rita to come in with a higher power setting. “This feels better,” she commented. “But I’m still hearing that rumble. Little more pronounced now, if anything,”

“Looks better,” the junior LSO told Jake. “I think the boards give her more control.”

“Six-hundred-feet-a-minute sink rate,” Rita reported. Once again the main mounts smacked in with puffs of fried rubber from each tire as it rotated up to speed. The main oleos compressed and the nose slapped down, then she was adding power and pulling the nose right back up into the sky.

After the sixth pass she pulled the throttles back to idle and the plane stayed on the deck. The engine noise was really subdued.

“Quiet bugger, ain’t it?” one LSO said, grinning. “We’ll have to call this one the Burglar. First we had the Intruder, now the Bur- glar.”

“I think it ought to be called the Penetrator,” the senior man said. ” ‘Yeah, baby, I’m a Penetrator pilot’” He cackled at his own wit.

When Rita cleared the runway. Smoke Judy called the LSOs. “Since you guys are all set up, how about giving me a couple?”

“If you got the gas, you get the pass,” the LSO radioed.

The debriefing took until 9 P.M. with an hour break for dinner. The telemetry data and the videotapes were played and studied. Rita and Toad were each carefully debriefed as a dozen engineers gath- ered around and the naval officers hovered in the background.

The plane was then thoroughly inspected by a team of structural engineers. The simulated carrier landings had placed stresses on the structure that the air force had never anticipated when it devel- oped the specifications for this prototype. No one expected visible damage, and there was none, but if the plane were to be put into production, strengthening would inevitably be needed. Just where and how much was the concern, and the telemetry data would pinpoint these locations.

And some minor equipment problems had surfaced. The Consol- idated technicians would work all night to fix those as navy main- tenance specialists watched and took notes. The intake rumble m the landing pattern was the most serious problem, and Adele DeCrescentis discussed it on the phone with the people at the Con- solidated factory in Burbank for over an hour.

All in all, it had been a fine day. Rita and Toad were still going a mile a minute when Jake loaded them all into the vans at 9 P.M. for the two-mile trip to the VOQ, the Visiting Officers’ Quarters.

Jake and his department heads gathered in his room that evening. Someone produced a cold six-pack of beer and they each took a bottle.

“The day after tomorrow. It’ll all be decided then,” Les Rich- ards, the A-6 bombardier, told the assembled group. “Day after tomorrow we pull some Gs. and I don’t think we can live with a five-G limitation. I don’t think the navy needs an attack plane for a low-level mission that is that G-limited. It’ll get bounced around too much down low, and if a fighter ever spots it or someone pops an IR or optically guided missile, this thing is dead meat.”

“What if they beef it up?” someone asked. “Strengthen the spars and so on?”

“Cut performance too much. More weight. We don’t have a whole lot of performance to begin with. And what if the compres- sors stall?”

“Could they enlarge the automatic flaps on the intakes that raise up and scoop more air in when the engines need it?”

“It’d be turbulent air. We learned today that those two engines like a diet of smooth, undisturbed air.”

“Oh no we didn’t.”

So it went. Jake ran them all out at midnight and collapsed into bed.

The following day was spent in further intensive review of the videotapes and telemetry data, and planning the second flight.

Glitches developed. Under the usual ground rules for op-eval fly-offs, the manufacturer cleared various areas of the flight perfor- mance envelope for the navy test pilots to explore. Rita wanted to examine the slow-flight characteristics of the aircraft before she proceeded to high-angle-of-attack/high-G maneuvers. Consolidat- ed’s chief engineer did not want her below 200 knots clean and 120 knots dirty.

When Jake joined the conversation, Rita was saying, “I flew the plane at 124 knots yesterday, three o’clock angle of attack. Now, is that 1.3 times the stall speed or isn’t it? How are we supposed to verify the stall speed if we can’t stall it?”

Jake merely stood and listened.

“We’ve told you what the stall speed is,” the engineer explained patiently, “at every weight and every altitude and every configura- tion. Those speeds were established by experimental test pilots.”

“Well, I’m an engineering test pilot — all navy test pilots are trained to that standard — but I can’t see how we can do a proper operational evaluation of your airplane if we don’t explore the left side of the envelope.”

The civilian appealed to Jake. “Listen, Captain. This is the only prototype we have. If she drills a deep hole with it, we have big problems. It’ll be goddamn hard to sell an airplane when all we have is the wreckage.”

“What makes you think,” Jake asked, “that she can’t safely re- cover from a stall?”

“I didn’t say that. You’re putting words into my mouth.”

“Get DeCrescentis over here.” The chief engineer went off to find her.

“We have to stall that plane. Captain,” Rita told him. “If those rumbles in the landing pattern yesterday were incipient compressor stalls, we’ll get some real ones if we get her slowed down enough. I think that’s what Consolidated doesn’t want us into.”

Adele DeCrescentis backed her engineer. Jake heard her out, then said, “I don’t think you people really want to sell this plane to the navy.”

The vice president set her jaw- “We sure as hell want it in one piece to sell to somebody.”

“Well, I’ll tell you this. We’re going to fly that plane the way I want it flown or we’ll stop this show right now. The navy isn’t spending ten million bucks for a fly-off if all we can do is cruise the damn thing down the interstate at fifty-five. We’re trying to find out if that plane can be used to fight with, Ms. DeCrescentis, not profile around the Paris Air Snow.”

She opened her mouth, but Jake didn’t give her a chance. “I mean it. We’ll fly it my way or we won’t fly it. Your choice.”

She looked about her, opened her mouth, then closed it again. Finally she said, “I’ll have to think about it for a bit.” She wheeled and made a beeline for the Consolidated offices and the phones, the chief engineer trailing after her.

“Maybe you had better make a phone call too,” Rita suggested.

“Nope.” He looked at Rita and grinned. “Captains have to obey orders, of course, but George Ludlow and Royce Caplinger shoved me out in front on this one. They want me to make a recommenda- tion and take the heat, so they sort of have to let me do it my way.” He shrugged. “Generally speaking, doing it your way is not very good for your career, but I’ve been to the mat once too often anyway. That’s why I got this job. Ludlow’s a pretty good SECNAV. He understands the navy and the people in it. He wouldn’t send a guy with a shot at flag over to Capitol Hill to get his balls cut off, not if he had any other choice.”

Rita looked dubious.

“Are you right about this. Miss Moravia?”

“Yes, sir. I am.”

“I think so too. So that’s the way well do it. As long as I’m in charge.”

When Adele DeCrescentis returned, she agreed with Jake. Ap- parently the president of the company could also read tea leaves.

“Go find that Consolidated test pilot,” Jake told Rita when they were alone. “Take him over to the club and buy him a drink. Find out everything he knows about stalling this invisible airplane off the record.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Rita said, and marched off.

Cumulus clouds and rain squalls moving through the area from the west delayed the second flight another day, but when she finally got the plane to altitude, Rita attacked the performance envelope with vigor while Smoke Judy in the F-14 hung like glue on first one wing, then the other.

Stalls were first.

They were almost last. With the nose at ten degrees above the horizon and the power at 70 percent, she let the plane coast into the first one, but didn’t get there because the pitty-pat thumping began in the intakes and increased in intensity to a drumming rat- a-tat-tat played by a drunk. The EOT rose dramatically and RPMs dropped on both engines. She could feel vibrations reaching her through the seat and throttles and rudder pedals.

Compressor stalls! Well, that mousy little test pilot for Consoli- dated hadn’t been lying. She pushed the nose over, which inciden- tally worsened the thumping from behind the cockpit, and held it there while her speed increased and the noise finally abated, all the while reading the numbers from the engine instruments over the radio.

With the engines back to normal, she had another thought. If a pilot got slow and lost power in the landing pattern, on final, this thing could pancake into the ground short of the runway. Aboard ship the technical phrase for that turn of events was “ramp strike.”

She smoothly pulled the nose to twenty degrees above the hori- zon and as her speed dropped began feeding in power until she had the throttles forward against the stops. The airspeed continued to decay. This was “the back side of the power curve,” that flight regime where drag increased so dramatically as the airspeed bled off that the engines lacked sufficient power to accelerate the plane.

The onset of compressor stall was instantaneous and dramatic, a violent hammering from the intakes behind the cockpit that caused the whole plane to quiver. Before she could recover, the plane stalled. It broke crisply and fell straight forward until the nose was fifteen degrees below the horizon, then the canard authority re- turned. Still the engine compressors were stalled, with EGT going to the red lines and RPM dropping below 85 percent.

Rita smartly retarded the throttles to keep the engines from overtemping. The pounding continued.

Throttles to idle. EGT above red line.

She chopped the throttles to cutoff, securing the flow of fuel to the engines.

The pounding ceased. The cockpit was very quiet.

Toad remarked later that all he could hear as Rita worked to restart the engines “was God laughing.”

This time as Rita approached touchdown, she flared the plane and pulled the throttles aft. Sure enough, the pounding of turbu- lent air in the intakes began just before the main wheels kissed the runway. She held the nose off and watched the EGT tapes twitch as the plane decelerated. When she was losing stabilator authority, she lowered the nose to the runway and smoothly applied the brakes.

“Another day, another dollar,” Toad told her on the ICS.

Removing the engines from the airplane, inspecting them, inspect- ing the intakes and reinstalling the engines took three days, mainly because Jake Grafton demanded that a factory rep look at the compressor and turbine blades with a microscope, which had to be flown in.

Consolidated’s chief engineer was livid. He was so furious that he didn’t trust himself to speak, and turned away when anyone in uniform approached him. Adele DeCrescentis was equally out- raged, but she hid it better. She listened to Rita and reviewed the telemetry and videotapes and grunted when Jake Grafton spoke to her.

The navy personnel left the Consolidated employees to their mis- ery.

“We’re wasting our time flying that bird again,” Les Richards and George Wilson told Jake. “It’s unsat and there is no possible fix that would cure the problem. The whole design sucks.”

“How do you know they can’t fix it?”

“Well, look at it. At high angles of attack the intakes are blanked off by the cockpit and the shape of the fuselage, that aerodynamic shape. How could they fix it?”

“Goddamn, I’m not an aeronautical engineer! How the hell would I know?”

“Well, I am,” Wilson said, “and they can’t.”

“Never say never. Regardless, we’re going to fly this bird five times. I don’t want anyone to say that we didn’t give Consolidated a fair chance.”

“We’re wasting our time and the navy’s money.”

“What’s a few million?” Jake asked rhetorically. The real objec- tive was to get money for an acceptable airplane from Congress. So he was philosophical.

Toad Tarkington slipped down the hall to his wife’s room when he thought everyone else was in bed. They had been running a low- profile romance since they arrived in Tonopah.

“Tell me again,” Toad said, “just what that Consolidated test pilot said about stalls when you pumped him. What’s his name?”

“Stu Vinich. He just said they had had some compressor-stall problems at high angles of attack.”

“Nothing else? Nothing about how serious they were?”

“He couldn’t. Toad. The company was downplaying the whole subject. People who talk out of school draw unemployment checks.”

“We were damned lucky that thing didn’t spin. And we were lucky the engines relit.”

“Luck is a part of the job,” Rita told him.

“Yeah. If we had punched and our chutes hadn’t opened, Vinich would have just stood at our graves and shook his head.”

“He said enough- I knew what to expect.”

Toad turned out the light and snuggled down beside her.

Jake Grafton was poking and prodding the plane, trying to stay out of the technicians’ way. when he noticed Adele DeCrescentis watching him. He walked over- ”You know,” he said, “this thing reminds me of a twelve-ton Swiss watch.”

“A quartz watch,” the vice president said.

“Yeah. Anyway, I was wondering. Just how hard would it be for your folks to put a twenty-millimeter cannon on this plane?”

“A gun?” She appeared dumbfounded, as if the idea had never occurred to her.

“Uh-huh. A gun. A little Gatling, snuggled inside the fuselage with five hundred rounds or so. What do you think?”

“When we were designing this plane, not a single, solitary air force officer ever even breathed the word ‘gun.’ “

“Somehow that doesn’t surprise me. But would it be feasible?”

“With some fairly major design changes, which will cost a good deal of money, I suppose it might be. It would take a full-blown engineering study to determine that for sure. But why? A machine like this? You want it down in the weeds dueling with antiaircraft guns? Shooting at tanks?”

“When tanks are the threat, Ms. DeCrescentis, we won’t be able to shoot million-dollar missiles at all of ‘em. The Warsaw Pact has over fifty thousand tanks. A nice little twenty-millimeter with ar- mor-piercing shells would be just the right prescription.”

Senator Hiram Duquesne was not philosophical when he tele- phoned George Ludlow. “You keeping up on what’s going on out in Tonopah?” he thundered.

“Well, I get reports from Vice Admiral Dunedin. Captain Graf- ton reports to him several times a day.”

“I want to know why the officer in charge out there insisted on performing maneuvers that the manufacturer did not feel the plane was ready for, or safe to perform.”

“He’s doing an op eval. He knows what he’s doing.”

“Oh does he? He’s got a twenty-five-year old woman with no previous test experience flying that plane, a four-hundred-rnillion- dollar prototype!”

“She’s not twenty-five. She’s twenty-seven.”

“Have you seen her?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean what the hell is going on over there, George? A lot of people have a lot riding on the outcome of this fly-off. And you got Bo Derek’s little sister out there flying the planes! Is she the best test pilot you people have? My God, we’ve been spending millions for that Test Pilot School in Pax River — is she the best you’ve got?”

“If you have any information that implies she’s incompetent, I’d like to hear it.”

“I hear she intentionally shut down both engines while she was up in the sky. Now Consolidated is spending a ton checking them far damage. I’ll bet Chuck Yeager never shut down both engines on a test flight at the same time!”

“I wouldn’t know. You’d have to ask the air force.”

“Don’t get cute. I’m serious. Dead serious. Don’t let that hero fly-boy Grafton and his bimbo test pilot screw this up, George. I’m warning you.”

“Thanks.”

“By the way, the authorization for reactors for that new carrier you guys want to start? My committee voted this morning to delete it. Maybe next year, huh?”

The senator hung up before Ludlow could respond.

Jake Grafton changed Rita’s test profile for the last three flights. He had her avoid all high-angle-of-attack maneuvers, though he did let her ease toward the advertised five-G limit, where the air- flow to the engines once again became turbulent and began to rumble.

The three flights took another ten days. When they were finished the navy crowd spent three more days correlating their data and talking to Consolidated engineers, then packed up for the return to Washington. It would be three weeks before they came back to fly the TRX prototype.

On their last night in Tonopah the navy contingent threw a party in the officers’ club for a very subdued group from Consoli- dated. Adele DeCrescentis didn’t attend, which was perhaps just as well. Along toward midnight, after Toad Tarkington had enjoyed the entire salubrious effect of alcohol and had begun the downhill slide, he spotted Stu Vinich in a corner putting the moves on some woman from Consolidated’s avionics division. He strolled over, tapped Vinich on the shoulder, and as the test pilot turned, flat- tened him with one roundhouse punch.