The Minotaur

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 command. 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, avionics 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.

Toad also kept track of their position over the earth, and every now and then wasted three seconds on a glance over at the chase plane. Still there, precisely where it should be. Smoke Judy was a no-nonsense, Sierra Hotel pilot who had almost nothing to say on the radio; he knew how busy Rita and Toad were.

Periodically Toad reminded Rita of which task was next on the list. He could just see the top of her helmet, partially masked by the top of her ejection seat, if he looked straight ahead. He could also see the upside-down reflection of her lap and arms in the canopy, weirdly distorted by the curvature. Her hand on the stick — he could see that because in this plane the control stick was where it should be, between the pilot’s legs.

And the sun. He saw the brilliance of the sun’s gaze as the sublime light played across the kneeboard on his right thigh and back and forth across the instruments on the panel before hiro.

“How’s control response?” he asked.

“Better.” In a moment she added, “Still not right, though.”

He would never have known it from the sensations reaching him through the plane. The ride was smooth as glass. “I told Orville and Wilbur they were wasting their time. They wouldn’t listen.”

“What’s next?”

She already knew, of course. She had prepared the flight profile. To humor her. Toad consulted his copy. “High-G changes.”

“Okay.”

He felt the surge as the power increased. Rita wasted no time. He saw her glance at Smoke Judy, assuring herself the F-14 was clear, then the left wing sagged gently as the nose began to rise and the G increased. The G came on in a steadily rising grunt as the horizon tilted crazily. Rita was flying the G line on the holographic HUD. Toad temporarily abandoned his radar research and strained every muscle in the classic M-l maneuver, trying to retain blood in his head and upper body as he forced air in and out past his lips. The inflatable pads in his G suit had become giant sau- sages, squeezing his legs to keep the blood from pooling there.

This maneuver was designed to allow Rita to explore the limits of G and maneuverability at ever-changing airspeeds. Toad felt the nibble of the stall buffet, and for the first time felt the wings rock sloppily, almost as if Rita were fighting to control their position.

“I’m having some troub—” she said, but before she could com- plete the thought the plane departed.

The down wing quit flying and the upper wing flopped them over inverted. The plane began to gyrate wildly. Positive Gs mashed them for half a second, then negative Gs threw them up against their harness straps, but since the airplane was inverted, it was upward toward the earth. The airplane spun like a lopsided Frisbee, bucking up and down madly as the Gs slammed them, positive, negative, positive, negative. The ride was so violent Toad couldn’t read the MFDs on the panel before him.

“Inverted spin,” he gasped over the ICS,

“The controls — it won’t—” Rita sounded exasperated.

“You’re in an inverted spin,” Toad heard a hard, calm male voice say. Smoke Judy on the radio.

“I’m — the controls—“

‘Twenty-nine thousand… twenty-eight …” By a supreme effort of will Toad made himself concentrate on the altimeter and read the spinning needles.

“Spin assist,” he reminded her. This switch would allow the horizontal stabilator its full travel, not restricted by its high-speed limited throw. The danger was if the pilot pulled too hard at high speed without the mechanical limit, the tail might be ripped away. Right now Rita needed all the help she could get to pull the nose down.

“It’s on.”

“Twenty-five thousand.” He was having trouble staying con- scious. The ride was vicious, violent beyond description. His vision closed in until he was looking through a pipe. He knew the signs. He was passing out “Twenty-two,” he croaked.

Miraculously the violent pitching action of the nose decreased and he felt as if he were being thrown sideways. As the G de- creased, his vision came back. Rita had them out of the spin and diving. She had the power back, about 90 percent or so. She rolled the plane upright and the G came on steadily as she pulled to get them out of their rocketing dive. “Okay,” she whispered, “okay, baby, come to Mama.”

The wings started rocking again as the G increased, and Toad opened his mouth to shout a warning. Too late. The right wing slammed down and the plane rolled inverted again. “Spin,” was all he could get out.

He fought the slamming up and down. “Seventeen thou- sand…”

“Rita, you’d better eject.” The hard, fast voice of Smoke Judy-

“I’ve got it,” Rita shouted on the radio. ”Stay with me.” That was for Toad. She had the nose coming steadily down now, that yawning sensation again as she fed in full rudder.

“Fifteen grand,” Toad advised.

They were running out of sky.

“It’s the controls! I’ve—“

“Thirteen!”

She was out of the spin now, upright, but the nose was still way low, seventy degrees below the horizon. Power at idle, she de- ployed the speed brakes and began to cautiously lift the nose.

“Eleven thousand.”

“Come on, baby.”

“Ten.”

The ground was horribly close. Their speed was rapidly build- ing, even with the boards out and engines at idle. The ground elevation here was at least four thousand feet above sea level, so they were within six thousand feet of the ground, now five, still forty degrees nose down. They would make it Rita added another pound of back pressure to the stick.

The left wing snapped down.

Toad pulled the ejection handle.

The windblast hit him like the fist of God. He was tumbling, then he wasn’t, now hurling toward the earth — an earth so close he could plainly see every rock and bush — and cursing himself for the fool that he was for waiting so long. Lazily, slowly, as if time didn’t matter, the seat kicked him loose with a thump. The ground was right there, racing up at him. He closed his eyes. He was going to die now. So this is how it feels… A tremendous shock snapped through him, almost ripping his boots off. The opening shock of the parachute canopy. The ground was right there! He swung for another few seconds, then smashed into a thicket of brush. Too late he remembered he should have protected his head. He came to rest in the middle of an opaque dust cloud.

He was conscious through ft all. He wiggled his limbs experi- mentally. Still in one piece, thank the Lord!

Rita! Where was Rita?

He was standing before the dust had cleared, ripping his helmet off and trying to see. He tore at his Koch fittings. There! Rid of the chute.

Striding out of the brush, almost falling, looking.

Another dust cloud. Several hundred yards away and down the hill slightly. Something had impacted there. Rita? But there was no chute visible.

Mother of God!

He began to run.