The Minotaur

3

At was almost 9 A.M. when the subway train — the Metro — ground to a halt at the Pentagon sta- tion. Jake Grafton joined the civilian and military personnel exit- ing and followed the thin crowd along the platform. Rush hour for about 23.000 people who worked in this sprawling five-story building was long over. The little handful that Jake accompanied seemed to be made up of stragglers and visiting civilians.

Just ahead of Jake a man and a woman in casual clothes led two small children. When they came to the long escalator, the kids squealed joyfully and started to run up the moving stair. Each parent grabbed a small arm, then a hand.

The sloping staircase was poorly lighted. As he looked at the dim lights, Jake noticed the plaster on the ceiling was peeling away in spots.

At the head of the escalator two corridors led in, one from either side, and more people joined the procession, which trudged ever upward on a long, wide staircase toward the lights above.

At the head of the stair was a large hall, and the stream of people broke up, some heading for the mam eotrance, some mov- ing cautiously toward the visitors’ tour area. The couple that Jake had followed led their progeny in that direction with an admoni- tion to behave. Jake approached the two Department of Defense policemen scrutinizing passes at the security booth. “I have an appointment with Vice Admiral Henry.”

“Do you have a building pass, sir?”

“No.”

“Use those phones right over there”—he pointed at telephones by the tour windows—“and someone will come down to escort you.”

‘Thanks.” Jake called and a yeoman answered. Five minutes, the yeoman said.

Jake stood and watched the people. Men and women wearing the uniforms of all four services came and went, most walking quickly, carrying briefcases, folders, gym bags and small brown paper bags that must have contained their lunches. People leaving the interior of the building walked by the security desk without a glance from the two armed DOD policemen.

“Captain Grafton?”

A small black woman in civilian clothes stood at his elbow. “Yes?” he said.

“I’m your escort.” She smiled and flashed her pass at the guards and motioned Jake toward the metal detector that stood to the left of the security booth. He walked through it. nothing beeped, and the woman led him through the open doors into another huge hallway, this one lined with shops. Directly across from the en- trance was a large gedunk — a store selling snacks, magazines and other sundries.

“I was expecting a yeoman.”

“The phone started ringing and he sent me down.”

As she led him along the corridor, he asked, “How long did it take you to learn your way around in here?”

“Oh, I’m still learning-I’ve only been here five years. It’s confus- ing at times.”

They went up a long ramp that opened onto the A-Ring, the central corridor that overlooked the five-acre interior courtyard. As they proceeded around the ring, Jake glanced through the win- dows at the grass and huge trees and the snack bar in the center.

“Have you ever been here before?” she asked.

“Nope,” said Jake Grafton. “I’ve always managed to avoid it.”

After she had gone what seemed like a hundred yards or so, she turned right and ascended a staircase with a ninety-degree bend in it and at the top turned right. They were atill on the A-Ring, but on the fourth level. After another fifty feet she veered left down a corridor, then right onto another corridor that zagged away at an angle. “Now we’re walking back toward the outside of the build- ing,” she said. “There are five concentric rings in the Pentagon. The inner is the A-Ring, and next is B, and so forth, with the outer being E. They are connected by ten radial corridors like the spokes of a wagon wheel. It’s supposed to be efficient but it does confuse newcomers.” She grinned.

This corridor had little to commend it. It was lit by fluorescent lights, and over half the tubes were dark. The walls were bare. Not a picture or a poster. Dusty, tied-down furniture was stacked along one wall. It looked as if it had been there since the Elsenhower administration. Catching Jake’s glance, the guide said, “It’s been there for three months. Some of the offices got new furniture. This is the old stuff.” The piles were composed of sofas and chairs and scarred and battered gumnetal-gray desks. “These places on the ceiling where the plywood is?” Jake looked. The plaster was fall- ing off from water seepage from the roof and asbestos was being released.

At the end of the corridor stood a magnificent large painting of Admiral Dewey’s flagship, Olympia, entering Manila Bay. Spots illuminated it The guide turned right and Jake followed. The over- head blue mantel proclaimed: “Naval Aviation.” Here the hallway was well lit, painted a yellowish pastel and decorated with pictures of past and present naval and marine aircraft. This straight stretch was long, a third as long as the outside, of the building. Almost at the end, his guide turned left into a large office. The sign over the door said: “Assistant, Chief of Naval Operations, Air Warfare.” Beside the door was a blue sign that read: “OP-05.” This was the office of the senior U.S. Naval Aviator, Mr. Naval Aviation.

The room was large and contained numerous windows facing south across the huge parking lot toward Arlington. Wooden desks, blue drapes, wainscoting on the walls.

A commander greeted Jake. “I’m a little early,” Jake said, glanc- ing at his watch.

“I’ll see if the admiral’s free.” He was. Jake was escorted in through a swinging double saloon door.

Vice Admiral Tyler Henry rose from his chair and came around his desk wearing a warm smile to greet Jake.

“Good to see you again, Captain.” The men had met on several occasions in the past, but Jake was unsure if Henry would remem- ber. After he pumped Jake’s hand the admiral motioned to a chair. “Please, be seated. Have any trouble getting here this morning?”

“I rode the Metro this morning, sir,” Jake said as the admiral seated himself behind his desk. It was dark wood, perhaps mahog- any. A matching table extended outward from the main desk, forming the leg of a T. It was at this table Jake sat.

“Good idea. Parking places are all for car pools and flag of- ficers.” He pushed the button on his intercom box. “Chief, did Commander Gadd sweep the office this morning?”

“Yessir,” was the tinny reply. »

“Are the window buzzers on?”

“Yessir.”

“Please close my door… Window buzzers are little security gizmos to vibrate the glass. Supposed to foil parabolic mikes, but who knows?” the admiral explained. “The damn things play wait- ing room music, and I can’t hear noises like that anymore.” Jake listened hard. He could just hear the beat and a trumpet.

The admiral leaned back comfortably in his chair as the door to the office closed behind Jake. “Soundproof,” he muttered, then smiled. “You look surprised.”

Jake smiled, his embarrassment showing. “Seems like a lot of trouble to go to just to talk to the guy who’s going to be designing the new officer fitness report form.”

The admiral smiled broadly. “That job has been floating around with no takers. No, we have another project for you that is going to demand expertise of a different sort.”

The Minotaur

Jake was having trouble holding his eyebrows still. “I thought,” he said softly, “that I was a pariah around here.”

The smile disappeared from Admiral Henry’s face, “I’m not go- ing to bullshit you. Captain. Last fall when you disobeyed a direct order from a vice admiral, you may have torpedoed any chance you had of ever getting promoted again. Now with hindsight and all, most people can see you did the right thing. But the military won’t work if people go around telling flag officers to get fucked. For any reason, justified or not. And the congressmen and politicos from SECDEFs office who interfered with a navy investigation of that incident made you no friends.”

He raised his hand when Jake opened his mouth to speak. “I know, I know, you had nothing whatever to do with that and you couldn’t control the politicians even if you tried. No one can. They go any damn place they want with hobnail boots. Still, they raised hackles when they implied the navy couldn’t or wouldn’t be fair in its treatment of a naval officer.”

“I understand.”

The admiral nodded. “I suspect you do. Your record says you’re one of our best, which is why I asked for you. We need a shit-hot attack pilot with a ton of smarts and a gilt-edge reputation who can waltz a little project through the minefields. You’re him.”

Jake flexed his hands and rearranged his bottom in his chair. “I didn’t think my reputation was quite that shiny. And I’ve never had any Pentagon duty before.”

Henry pretended not to have heard. “Do you want to hear about the job?”

“I’m just a little surprised, sir. Shocked might be a better word. I’d thought…” He punched the air. “What’s the Job?”

“You’ll be working for Vice Admiral Roger Dunedin. He’s NAVAIR.” NAVAIR was Naval Air Systems Command, the pro- curement arm of naval aviation. “He needs a new program man- ager for the Advanced Tactical Aircraft, also known as the ATA. If and when we get it, it’ll be the A-12.”

Jake Grafton couldn’t suppress a grin.

The admiral laughed. “The fact we have this project is unclassi- fied. ATA, A-12, those are the only two things unclass in the whole program, and those two terms were just recently declassified. The project is black.” Jake had heard about “black” programs, so highly classified that even the existence of the program was some- times a secret.

The admiral rapped a knuckle on the desk. “So far, it appears to be one of our best-kept military secrets.” His voice fell to a mur- mur. “No way of being sure, of course.”

Henry fixed his eyes on Jake. “The A-12 is our follow-on air- plane for the A-6.” The A-6 Intruder was the aircraft carriers’ main offensive weapon, an all-weather medium attack plane.

“But I thought the A-6 was going to remain in the inventory into the next century. That was the justification for the A-6G proj- ect — new graphite-composite wings and updated avionics.”

“The A-6 had to have the new wings just to stay in the air, and the A-6G avionics are going into the A-12. We were trying the new gee-whiz gizmos out in the A-6G, until they canceled it.” The A-6G had died under the budget cutters’ knives. Henry smiled wickedly. “The A-12 will have something even better. Athena. Do you know Greek mythology?”

“A smattering. Wasn’t Athena the goddess of war, the protector of warriors?”

“Yep, and she had a quality that we are going to give to our new plane.” He paused and raised one finger aloft. When he grinned like that his eyebrows matched the curve of his Ups- “She could make herself invisible.”

Jake just stared.

“Stealth technology- The air force built a land-based fighter: that’s first-generation stealth technology. Then came new paint and radar-absorbent materials and the flying-wing shape — that’s second-generation.” His voice dropped conspiratorially. “We’re building an all-weather, go-anywhere anytime carrier-based attack plane that will equal or exceed the A-6 in range, speed and payload, and carry advanced sensors that will make the A-6 look blind as a cornfield scarecrow. These sensors — anyway, they’re a whole new generation beyond the A-6. And the A-12 will have third-generation stealth technology — Athena — which will make it truly invisible to radar. A stealth Super-Intruder, if you wid. That’s the A-12.” Henry’s eyebrows danced.

“And that, my friend, is the secret”

The admiral smacked his hand on the desk. The gold rings encir- cling his sleeve attracted Jake’s eye. ‘The Russians don’t know about it. Yet. If we can get this thing to sea before they steal the technology and figure out how to counter it, we’ve pretty well guaranteed that there won’t be a conventional war with the Soviets for at least the next ten years. Their ships would be defenseless against a stealth Intruder.”

Admiral Henry sighed. “We’re trying to build one of these things, anyway. You’re replacing Captain Harold Strong, who was killed in a car wreck a month ago. We had to wait to get you, but now, by God, your ass is ours.”

Jake Grafton sat stunned. “But how — all the weapons will have to be carried externally and they’ll reflect energy — how will you get around that?”

The corners of Henry’s lips turned up until his mouth formed a V and his eyebrows danced. “You’re going to enjoy this job. Cap- tain.”

“A real job,” Jake said, his relief obvious. “And I thought I was just going to be designing fitness report forms.”

“Oh,” Henry boomed. “If you want you can work on that in your spare time. Don’t know when you’d sleep, though-” He turned serious. “Things are really starting to move. We’ve got two prototypes about ready to fly — constructed by two different manu- facturers — and we must get them evaluated and award the produc- tion contract. We’ve got to quit noodling and get this show on the road. We need airplanes. That’s why you’re here.”

After a glance at his watch, Henry reached for his intercom. His hand hovered near it. “Start checking in,” he said hurriedly. “Go get your paperwork done. They’ve got some orders for you some- place; you’ll have to find them. Maybe at NAVAIR, which is over at Crystal City. Then you might go around the corner and intro- duce yourself to the project coordinator. Commander Rob Knight. He’s here today, I think. I’ll see you at nine tomorrow morning. And then I want to hear all about the attack on United States and how you started El Hakim on the road to Paradise.”

He keyed the intercom and started talking as he shooed Jake out with his left hand. Jake didn’t even get a chance to say thanks.

Crystal City, Jake was informed by Henry’s aide, was across the Pentagon’s south parking lot, on the other side of the highway, southeast of the Pentagon. NAVAIR was in buildings JP-1 and JP-2, in the northern portion of the Crystal City office complex. He wandered out into the corridors and walked along slightly dazed. A real job! A big job!

Although the aide had suggested the shuttle bus, Jake decided to walk. After asking an air force officer in the parking lot which set of tall buildings was which and getting a careful sighting across a pointing finger, Jake began walking. The wind was chilly, but not intolerably so. Under 1-395, across a four-lane boulevard dodging traffic, under U.S. Route 1, the hike took about ten minutes. He accosted a pedestrian and building Jefferson Plaza 1 was pointed out. In he went, punched the elevator button and after waiting what seemed to be an inordinately long time, rode to the twelfth floor, the top one.

They did have a set of orders. It took the civilian secretary five minutes to find them, and in the interim Jake visited with three officers he knew from his shipboard days. With the orders in his hand, the secretary called a yeoman, who put the captain to work filling out forms.

Jake was eating lunch in Gus’s Place, a commercial cafeteria on the ground floor of the complex, when Toad Tarkington spotted him. Toad came over, tray in hand. “Saw you sitting over here by yourself, CAG. May I join you?”

Jake moved his tray and Toad off-loaded his food onto the table.

A group of junior officers twenty feet away began to whisper and glance in their direction.

“How has your morning gone?”

“Same old stuff,” Toad announced as he placed his large brown manila envelope full of orders and forms on his chair and carefully sat on it “Got my picture taken for my permanent building pass, which I’m supposed to pick up this afternoon. I must have signed my name fifty times this morning. Every naval activity between here and Diego Garcia will soon receive notification in triplicate that I can be found sitting on the bull’s-eye at this critical nerve center of the nation’s defenses, ready to save the free world from the forces of evil.” Toad made a gesture of modesty and slowly unfolded his napkin.

“I hear we’re going to be putting that new officer fitness report form together, though just why the heck they got the two greatest aerial warriors of the age over here at NAVAIR to do that sort of beats me- Ours not to reason why…” He glanced at Jake to get his reaction as he smoothed the napkin on his lap.

Grafton sipped his coffee, then took another bite of tuna salad. “But what the hey,” Toad continued cheerfully. “Flying, walk- ing, or sitting on my ass, they pay me just the same. Do you know there are 3.4 women in Washington for every man? This is the place. Bachelor city. Sodom on the Potomac. A studly young lad ought to be able to do pretty well with all these lonely females seeking to satisfy their social and sexual needs. Mr. Accommoda- tion, that’s me. I figure with my salary—“

“The sexual revolution is over,” Jake muttered as he forked more tuna salad. “You missed it.”

“I’m carrying on a guerrilla campaign, sir. Indomitable and un- conquerable, that’s the ol’ Horny Toad, even in the age of latex. I just dress up like the Michelin man and go for it. A fellow could always spring a leak, I guess, but the bee must go from flower to flower. That’s the natural order of things.” He chewed thought- fully. “Have you noticed how those people over there keep sneak- ing looks at you”

“Yeah,” Jake didn’t took around. Although the room was filled with civilians and uniformed men and womea eating and carrying trays and visiting over coffee, the two junior officers two tables away had been glancing over and speaking softly since Jake sat down.

“Ifs been like that all day with me,” Toad said with a hint of despair in his voice, then sent another mouthful of food down behind his belt buckle. “At first I thought I had forgotten my pants, but now I think it’s the hero bit. Asked two admirers for dates this morning and got two yeses. Not bad for a Monday.”

“It’ll pass. Next week you’ll have to spell your name twice just to get into the men’s head. How’s your leg?”

“Got a couple girders in it, sir. One of them is a metal rod about a foot long. But I passed my flight physical. Those Israeli doctors did a good job. Aches some occasionally.”

“We were damned lucky.”

“That’s an understatement,” Toad said, and proceeded to fill Jake in on how he had spent the last five months.

After lunch Jake hiked back across the streets and parking lots to the Pentagon- His temporary pass so excited the security cop that he nodded his head a quarter inch as Jake walked by.

Commander Rob Knight was several years younger than Jake and had more hair, although it was salt-and-pepper. He wore steel- rimmed glasses and beamed when Jake introduced himself.

“Heard about your little adventure in the Med last year. Cap- tain. It’s been pretty dull without El Hakim to kick around,” Knight grinned easily. He had an air of quiet confidence that Jake found reassuring. Like all career officers getting acquainted, Knight and Jake told each other in broad terms of their past tours. Knight had spent most of his operational career in A-6 outfits, and bad been ordered to this billet after a tour as commanding officer of an A-6 squadron.

“I came by to find out everything you know about the A-12,” Jake said lightly.

Knight chuckled. “A real kidder, you are. I’ve been soaking up info for a year and a half and I haven’t even scratched the surface, And you see I’m only one guy. The A-6 coordinator sits here beside me. and on the other side of the room we have the F-14 and F/A-18 guys. One for each airplane. We don’t have a secretary or a yeoman. We do our own mail. We make our own coffee. I spend about a third of my time in this office, which is where I do the unclass stuff and confidential. Another third of my time is spent upstairs in the vault working on classified stuff. I have a desk up there with another computer and safes. The rest of my time is spent over at NAVAIR, in your shop, trying to see what you guys are up to.”

“Just one guy.” Jake was disappointed, and it showed. He felt a little like the kid who met Santa for the first time and found he was old and fat and smelled of reindeer shit. “One guy! Just exactly what is your job?”

“I’m the man with the money. I get it from Rear Admiral Cos- tello. He’s the Aviation Plans and Programs honcho. He tells me what we want the plane to do. We draw up the requirements. You build the plane we say we want, you sell it to me, and I write the checks. That’s it in a nutshell.”

“Sounds simple enough.”

“Simple as brain surgery. There’s an auditor that comes around from time to time, and he’s going to cuff me and take me away one of these days. I can see it in his eyes.”

They talked for an hour, or rather Knight talked and Jake lis- tened, with his hands on his thighs. Knight had a habit of tapping aimlessly on the computer terminal on his desk, striking keys at random. When Jake wasn’t looking at Knight he was looking at the Sports Illustrated swimsuit girl over Knight’s desk (April 1988 was a very good month), or the three airplane pictures, or the Farrah Fawcett pinup over the A-6 guru’s desk. Between the two desks sat a flung cabinet with combination locks on every drawer- Similar cabinets filled the room. Twice Knight rooted through an open cabinet drawer and handed Jake classified memos to read, but not to keep. Each was replaced in its proper file as soon as Jake handed it back.

Then Knight took Jake up a floor to the vault, where he signed a special form acknowledging the security regulations associated with black programs. In this chamber, surrounded by safes and locks and steel doors. Commander Knight briefed him on the tech- nical details of the prototypes, the program schedules and so on.

At three o’clock Jake was back on the twelfth floor of the Crys- tal City complex to meet with Vice Admiral Dunedin. His office was not quite as plush as Henry’s but it was every bit as large. Out the large windows airliners were landing and taking off from Na- tional airport.

“Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?” Dunedin asked. He was soft-spoken, with short gray hair and workman’s hands, thick, strong fingers that even now showed traces of oil and grease. Jake remembered hearing that his hobby was restoring old cars.

“In a vague, hazy way.”

“Normally we assign Aeronautical Engineering Duty Officers, AEDOs, to be program managers. By definition, an AEDO’s spe- cialty is the procurement business. Harold Strong was an AEDO. But, considering the status of the A-12, we figured that we needed a war fighter with credibility on the Hill.” The Hill, Jake knew, was Capitol Hill, Congress. But who, he wondered, were the “we” of whom the admiral spoke? “You’re our warrior. There’s not enough time to send you to the five-month program manager school, so we’ve waived it. You’re going to have to hit the ground running. Your deputy is a GS-15 civilian. Dr. Helmut Pritsche. He’s only been here three years or so but he knows the ropes. And you’ve got some AEDOs on your staff. Use them, but remember, you’re in charge.”

“I won’t forget,” Jake Grafton said.

Dunedin’s secretary, Mrs. Forsythe, gave him a list of the of- ficers who would be under his supervision. She was a warm, moth- erly lady with silver-gray hair and pictures of children on her desk. Jake asked. Her grandchildren. She offered him a brownie she had baked last night, which he accepted and munched with approving comments while she placed a call to the Personnel Support De- tachment She gave him detailed directions on how to find PSD, which was, she explained, six buildings south. When Jake arrived fifteen minutes later a secretary was busy pulling the service records for him to examine.

He found an empty desk and settled in.

The civilian files stood out from the others. Helmut Fritsche. Ph.D. in electrical engineering, formerly professor at Caltech, be- fore that on the research staff of NASA. Publications; wow! Thirty or forty scientific papers. Jake ran his eye down the list. All were about radar: wave propagation, Doppler effect, numerical determi- nation of three-dimensional electromagnetic scattering, and so on.

George Wilson was a professor of aeronautical engineering at MIT on a one-year sabbatical. He had apparently been recruited by Admiral Henry and came aboard the first of the year. He would be leaving at the end of December. Like Fritsche’s, Wilson’s list of professional publications was long and complicated. He had co- authored at least one textbook, but the title that caught Jake’s eye was an article for a scientific journal: “Aerodynamic Challenges in Low Radar Cross Section Platforms.”

Jake laid the civilians’ files aside and began to flip through the naval officers. Halfway through he found one that he slowed down to examine with care. Lieutenant Rita Moravia. Naval Academy Class of ‘82. Second in her class at the Academy, first in her class in flight school and winner of an outstanding achievement award. Went through A-7 training, then transferred to F/A-ISs, where she became an instructor pilot in the West Coast replacement squad- ron. Next came a year at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monte- rey, California, for a master’s in aeronautical engineering, and an- other year at Test Pilot School at NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, where she graduated first in her class.

There were three line commanders: an A-6 bombardier-naviga- tor, an F-14 pilot and an EA-6B Electronic Countermeasures Of- ficer — ECMO. Jake knew the A-6 BN and the Prowler ECMO. There was an aircraft maintenance specialist, whom Jake knew, and five AEDOs, all of whom wore pilot or naval flight officer wings. Except for the A-6 BN and the Prowler ECMO, the rest had fighter backgrounds, including Tarkington, who was one of only two lieutenants. The rest were commanders and lieutenant commanders.

If the navy wanted a stealth attack plane, why so many fighter types? The air force called all their tactical drivers fighter pilots, but the navy had long ago divided the tactical fraternity into attack and fighter. The missions and the aircraft were completely differ- ent, so the training and tactics were also different. And according to the amateur psychologists in uniform who thought about these things and announced their conclusions at Happy Hour, the men were different too. Either their personalities were altered by the training or the missions attracted men of certain types. According to the attack community, fighter pukes were devil-may-care, kiss- tomorrow-goodbye romantics who lived and lusted for the dubious glory of individual combat in the skies. The fighter crowd said the attack pukes were phlegmatic plodders with brass balls — and no imaginations — who dropped bombs because they didn’t know any better. Most of it was good, clean fun, but with a tinge of truth.

When Jake finished going through the records he stacked them carefully and stared thoughtfully at the pile. Dunedin and Strong had assembled a good group, he concluded, officers with excellent though varied backgrounds, from all over tactical naval aviation- The test pilot was the only real question mark. Moravia certainly had her tickets punched and was probably smarter than Einstein, but she had no actual experience in flight-testing new designs. He would ask Dunedin about her.

Tomorrow he would meet them. That was soon enough. First he had to find out what was really happening from Henry or Dunedin.

Henry spoke of minefields — a grotesque understatement. The problems inherent in overcoming the inertia of the bureaucracy to produce a new state-of-the-art weapons system were nothing short of mind-boggling. Dunedin must feel like he’s been ordered to build the Great Pyramid armed with nothing but a used condom and a flyswatter. And for God’s sake, do it quietly, top secret and all. Aye aye, sir.

In the Crystal City underground mall he found a toy store and purchased a plastic model of the air force’s new stealth fighter, the F-117. He also bought a tube of glue. Then he boarded the Metro blue train for the ride to Rosslyn.

When the subway surfaced near the Key Bridge, Jake stared gloomily at the raindrops smearing the dirt on the windows as the train rocked along under a dark gray sky, then it raced noisily back into another hole in the ground and like his fellow passengers, he refocused his eyes vacantly on nothing as he instinctively created his own little private space.

He felt relieved when the doors finally opened and he joined the other passengers surging across the platform, through the turn- stiles, then onto the world’s longest escalator. The moving stair ascended slowly up the gloomy, slanting shaft bearing its veterans of purgatory. Amid the jostling, pushing, hustling throng, he was carried along as part of the flow. This morning he had been a tourist. Now he was as much a part of this human river as any of them. Morning and evening he would be an anonymous face in the mob: hurry along, hurry, push and shove gently, persistently, insis- tently, demanding equal vigor and speed from every set of legs, equal privacy from every set of blank, unfocused eyes. Hurry, hurry along.

Rain was still falling when he reached the sidewalk. He paused and turned his collar up against the damp and chill, then set off for the giant condo complex four blocks away.

Most of the people scurrying past him on the sidewalk had done this every working day for years. They were moles, he told himself glumly, blind creatures of the dark, damp places where the sun and wind never reached, unaware that the universe held anything but the dismal corridors where they lived out their pathetic lives. And now he was one of them.

He stopped at the corner, the model in the box under his arm. People swirled around him, their heads down, their eyes on the concrete. Callie wouldn’t get home to the flat for another hour.

He turned and walked back against the flow of the crowd toward the station exit. Right across the street from the exit was a Roy Rogers. He paid for a cup of coffee and found a seat near the atrium window where he could watch the gray people bent against the wind and the raindrops sliding down the glass.

The euphoria he had felt when he talked to Vice Admiral Henry this morning was completely gone. Now he had a job … a pa- perwork job, going to endless meetings and listening to reports and writing recommendations and trying to keep from going crazy. A job in the bureaucracy. A staff job, the one he had fought against, refused to take, pulled every string to avoid, all these years. In the puzzle palace, the place where good ideas go to die.

It could have been worse, of course. He could have been as- signed to design the new officer fitness report form.

Like many officers who spent their careers in operational billets, Jake Grafton loathed the bureaucrats, held them in a secret con- tempt which he tried to suppress with varying degrees of success. In the years since World War II, the bureaucracy had grown lush and verdant here in Washington. Every member of Congress had twenty aides. Every social problem had a staff of paper pushers ”managing” it. The military was just as bad. Joint commands with a staff of a thousand to fifteen hundred people were common.

Perhaps it happens because we are human. The people in the military endlessly analyze and train for the last war because no one knows what the next one will be Uke. New equipment and technol- ogies deepen the gloom which always cloaks the future. Yesterday’s warriors retire and new ones inherit the stars and the offices, and so it goes through generations, until at last every office is filled with men who have never heard a shot fired in anger or known a single problem that good, sound staff work, carefully couched in bureaucratese, could not “manage” satisfactorily. Inevitably the gloom becomes Stygian. Future war becomes a profound enigma that workaday admirals and generals and congressmen cannot pen- etrate. So the staffs proliferate as each responsible person seeks expert help with his day-to-day duties and the insoluble policy conundrums.

Another war would be necessary to teach the new generation the ancient truths. But in the Pax Americana following World War II, Vietnam accelerated the damage rather than arrested it.

In its aftermath Vietnam appeared to many as the first inadver- tent, incautious step toward the nuclear inferno that would destroy life on this planet. Frightened by the new technologies and fearful of the incomprehensible political forces at work throughout the world, citizens and soldiers sought — demanded — quantifiable truths and controls that would prevent the war that bad become unthinkable, the future war that had become, for the generations that had known only peace, the ultimate obscenity. Laws and regu- lations and incomprehensible organizational charts multiplied like bacteria in a petri dish. Engineers with pocket calculators became soothsayers to the terrified.

All of this Jake Grafton knew, and knowing it, was powerless to change. And now he was one of them, one of the faceless savants charged with creating salvation on his desk and placing it in the out basket.

Over on the beach it was probably raining like this. The wind would be moaning around the house and leaking around the win- dowpanes. The surf would be pounding on the sand. It would be a great evening for a walk along the beach under a gray sky, by that gray sea. Suddenly he felt an overpowering longing to feel the wind in his hair and the salt air in his nostrils.

Oh, to be there and not here! Not here with the problems and the hassles and the responsibilities.

His eye fell upon the bag that the clerk had placed the F-I17 model in. He ripped out the staple and slid the box from the bag. The artist had painted the plane black. It had twin vertical stabiliz- ers, slanted in at the bottom, and flat sides all over the place, all of which he suspected were devilishly expensive to manufacture. The intakes were on top of the fuselage, behind the canopy. How would the engines get air when the pilot was pulling Gs, maneuvering? He stared at the picture. No doubt this plane was fly-by-wire with a flight control computer stabilizing the machine and automatically trimming. But what would it feel like to fly it? What would be the weight and performance penalty to get this thing aboard ship? How much were they going to cost? Could these machines ever be worth the astronomical sums the manufacturers would want to charge? The politicians would decide.

Jake drained his coffee and threw the cup in the trash can by the door. He pulled the bag up over the box and rolled the excess tightly, then pushed the door open and stepped out into the eve- ning.

“Hi, darling,” Callie said brightly when she came home and found Jake assembling the model on the kitchen table.

“Hey, beautiful.” Jake looked up and grinned at her, then re- sumed his chore of gluing the landing gear into the wheel wells.

“So how was the first day back at the office?”

Jake laid the plastic model on the diagram and leaned back. in his chair. He stretched. “Okay, I guess. They didn’t tie me to the wooden post where they shoot traitors, and nobody said anything about a court-martial, so I guess I’m still in the navy.” He winked at her. “It’s going to be all right. Don’t sweat it.”

She poured a cup of coffee and blew across it gently, then took an experimental sip. She stood looking at him over the rim of the cup. “Where will you be working?”

“It’s a little shop, some cubbyhole that belongs to NAVAIR. I’ll be working on the new Advanced Tactical Aircraft.”

“Oh, Jake.” She took the seat beside him. “That’s terrific.” For the first time in months, her voice carried genuine enthusiasm.

“That’s about all I can tell you. The project is classified up the wazoo. But it’s a real job and it needs doing, which is a lot more than you can say for a lot of the jobs they have over there.”

He shouldn’t have added that last phrase. The muscles around her eyes tightened as she caught the edge in his voice. “After all you’ve done for the navy, they owed you a good job.”

“Hey, Callie, it doesn’t work like that. You get paid twice a mouth and that’s all they owe you. But this is a navy job and Lord knows how it’ll all turn out.” Perhaps he could repair the damage. “I’d rather have a navy job than be president of a bank. You know me, Callie.”

Her lips twisted into a lopsided smile. “Yes, I guess I do.” She put her cup on the coffee table and stood.

Uh-oh! Here we go again! Jake took out his shirttail and used it to clean bis glasses as she walked into the kitchen. You’d better be cool now, he decided. Help her along. He called out, “What say we go get some dinner? I’m hungry. How about you?”