The Minotaur

4

The ringing of the telephone woke Jake Grafton. As he groped for the receiver on the stand by the bed he blinked mightily to make out the luminous hands of the alarm dock: 5 A.M. “Grafton.”

“Good morning. Captain. Admiral Henry. I wanted to catch you before you got started this morning.”

“You did, sir.”

“How about meeting roe on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial about oh-seven-hundred in civilian clothes.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Thanks.” The connection broke.

“Who was that?” Callie asked as Jake cradled the phone and closed his eyes. The alarm wouldn’t ring for half an hour.

“0ne of my many bosses.”

“Oh,” she mattered. In less than a minute he heard her breath- ing deepen with sleep. He wondered what Tyler Henry wanted to talk about that couldn’t be said at the office. After five minutes he gave up trying to sleep and got out of bed. He tiptoed for the bathroom.

By the time the alarm went off he had showered and shaved and dressed. He had picked out dark gray slacks and a long-sleeved 3W shirt. Over this he had added a tie, an old sweater and a blazer.

38

“Good morning,” he said as he pushed the lever in on the back of the clock to silence it.

“Come hug me.” She smelled of warm woman and sleep. “It’s so nice having you here to give me my morning hug.” She pushed him back so she could see his face.

“I love you, woman.” He cradled her head in his hands. “You’re going to have to quit trying to analyze it and just accept it. It’s true.”

“Hmmm.” She flashed a smile and became all business as she moved away from him and got up. “Why the civilian clothes?”

“I’m playing hooky with the boss.”

“And it’s only your second day on the job. Lucky you,” she said as she headed for the bathroom. With the door closed she called, “How about turning on the coffeepot and toasting some English muffins?”

“Yeah.” He headed toward the kitchen, snapping on the lights as he went. “You’re a real lover, ace. One look at your sincere puss and they tighten up like an IRS agent offered a ten-dollar bribe.”

Vice Admiral Henry was sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memo- rial when the taxi deposited Jake in front. He came down the steps as Jake approached and joined him on the wide sidewalk. “Morn- ing, sir.”

The admiral flashed a smile and strolled to the curb. As he reached it a gray Ford Fairmont sedan sporting navy numbers on the door pulled to a stop. Henry jerked open the rear door without fanfare and maneuvered his six-foot-three-inch frame in. Jake fol- lowed him. When the door closed the sailor at the wheel got the car in motion.

“Why the cloak and dagger?”

“I don’t know who all the players are,” the admiral said without humor.

Jake watched the occasional pedestrians braving the blustery wind under a raw sky until he became aware that the admiral’s attention was on the vehicles on the street behind them. Jake glanced over his shoulder once or twice, then decided to leave the spy stuff to Henry. He watched the sailor handle the car. The man was good. No wasted motion. The car glided gently through the traffic, changing lanes at the last moment and gliding around cor- ners without the application of the brake, all quite effortlessly. It was a show and Jake watched it in silence.

“Could have picked you up at your place,” Henry muttered, “but I wanted to visit the Wall.” The Wall was the Vietnam Memo- rial, Just across the street from the Lincoln Memorial. “It’s been too long and I never seem to have any time.”

“I understand.”

“Turn left here,” Henry said to the driver, who complied. The car headed east on Independence Avenue. Henry ordered another left turn on Fourteenth Street and directed the driver to go by the Jefferson Memorial. “I think we’re clean,” he muttered to Jake after yet another careful look through the rear window. At the Jefferson Memorial, Henry asked the driver to pun over. “Come back for us at nine.”

He led Jake toward the walkway around the Tidal Basin. Across the basin the Washington Monument rose toward the low clouds. Beyond it, Jake knew, but not visible from here, was the White House.

Jake broke the silence first. “Does Admiral Dunedin know we’re having this talk this morning, sir?”

“Yeah. I told him. You work for him. But I wanted to brief you personally. What do you know about stealth?”

“The usual,” Jake said, snuggling into his coat against the chill wind. “What’s in the papers. Not much.”

“The air force contracted for two prototype stealth fighters un- der a blanket of absolute secrecy. Lockheed got the production contract They call the thing the F-117A. It’s a fighter in name only; it’s really an attack plane — performance roughly equivalent to the A-7 without afterburner but carries less than half the A-7 weapons load. Primary weapons are Maverick missiles. It’s a little ridiculous to call a subsonic minibomber a fighter, but if they can keep the performance figures low-key they might get away with it.”

“I thought that thing was supposed to be a warp-three killing machine.”

“Yeah. I suspect the congressmen who agreed to vote for a huge multibillion-buck project with no public debate probably did too. But even supersonic ain’t possible. The thing doesn’t even have afterburners. Might go supersonic in a dive — I don’t know. Any- way, the air force got more bang for their buck with the stealth bomber, the B-2, which Northrop is building. It’s also subsonic, a flying wing, but big and capable with a good fuel load. The only problem is the B-2s cost $516 million a pop, so unless you’re send- ing them to Moscow to save the human race, you can’t justify risking them on anything else. A B-2 isn’t a battlefield weapon.”

“How are these gizmos going to find their targets?” Conven- tional bombers used radar to navigate and locate their targets, but the transmission of a radar beam from a stealth bomber would reveal its location, thereby negating all the expensive technology used to hide it.

Admiral Henry settled onto a park bench with his back to the Tidal Basin. His eyes roamed the sidewalks, which were deserted on this early-spring morning- “You’re not going to believe this, but the air force hasn’t solved that problem yet. They’re waiting for technology that’s under development.”

Jake Grafton looked at Henry to see if he was serious. He ap- peared to be. “How about a satellite rig like the A-6G was going to have? The Navstar Global Positioning System?”

“That’s part of the plan, but the trouble with satellites is that you can’t count on them to last longer than forty-eight hours into a major East-West confrontation. And there’s only eight satellites aloft — the system needs twenty-eight. If they ever get all the birds aloft it should tell you your position to wnhin sixteen meters any- where on earth, but that’s a big if what with NASA’s shuttle and budget problems. No, I think the answer is going to be a system made up of a solid-state, ring-laser gyro inertial nav system, passive infrared sensors and a stealthy radar, one that powers up only enough to see what’s necessary, has automatic frequency agility, that sort of thing. That’s basically the A-6G and B-2 system. We’ll use it on the A-12. It’s still under development.”

Henry snorted and wiggled his buttocks to get comfortable. “Congress isn’t going to fund any significant B-2 buy. The way the whole budget process screwed up the buy, with inflation and pre- dictable overruns and underbuys, the last plane in the program is going to cost over a billion bucks. The manned strategic bomber is going the way of the giant panda and the California condor. We want to avoid the mistakes the air force made,”

“SAC will have more generals than airplanes.”

“The stealth concept has been around since World War II,” Henry continued, “more as a curio than anything else. It really became a driving force in aircraft design after Vietnam when it became apparent that conventional aircraft were going to have a very rough time surviving in the dense electronic environment over a Western European battlefield. Conventional electronic warfare can only do so much. The spooks say there’ll be too many frequen- cies and too many sensors. That’s the conventional wisdom, so it’s probably wrong.” He shrugged- “But any way you cut it, the attri- tion rate over that battlefield would be high, which favors the Sovi- ets. They have lots of planes and we can’t match them in quantity. So we would lose. Ergo, stealth.”

“But we could match them in quantity,” Jake said. “At least the air force could build a lot of cheap airplanes optimized for one mission, like fighter or attack. No room on carriers for that kind of plane, of course.”

“The air force doesn’t want that. Their institutional ethic is for more complex, advanced aircraft with greater and greater capabil- ity. That’s the whole irony of the stealth fighter. They’ve billed this technology as a big advance but in reality they got a brand-new tactical bomber with 1950s performance. But, they argue, it’s survivable- Now. For the immediate future. Until and only until the Russians come up with a way to find these planes — or someone else figures out a way and the Russians steal it. Even so, the only thing that made first-generation stealth technology feasible was smart weapons, assuming the crew can find the target. These planes have little or no capability with air-to-mud dumb bombs.” Henry stared at his toes and wriggled them experimentally. “Can you imagine risking a five-hundred-million buck airplane to dump a load of thousand-pounders on a bridge?”

“Does stealth ensure survivability?” Jake prompted, too inter- ested to notice his continuing discomfort from the breeze off the river.

“Well, it all boils down to whether or not you think fixed air bases are survivable in the war the air force is building their planes to fight, and that is a war in Europe against the Soviets which has escalated to a nuclear exchange. If I were a Russian I wouldn’t worry much about these airplanes — neither of which has any off- concrete capability — I’d just knock out their bases at the beginning of hostilities and forget about them.”

“What about a conventional war with the Soviets?”

“If anyone has figured out a way to keep it from going nuclear, I haven’t heard about it.”

“How many Maverick missiles are there? A couple thousand?”

“Twice that.”

“That’s still no more than a week or two’s supply. It’d better be a damn short war.”

The admiral grunted. “The basic dilemma: without stealth tech- nology the air force says planes can’t survive over a modern battle- field; with stealth they must use only sophisticated weapons that are too expensive to buy in quantity- And they’re not as reliable as cheap weapons. And if the airplanes truly are a threat, the Soviets have a tremendous stimulus to escalate the war to a nuclear strike to eliminate their bases.” He chopped the air with the cutting edge of his hand. ‘This stuff is grotesquely expensive.”

“Sounds like we’ve priced ourselves out of the war business.”

“I fucking wish! But enough philosophy. Stealth technology cer- tainly deserves a lot of thought. It’s basically just techniques to lower an aircraft’s electromagnetic signature in the military wave- lengths: radio — which is radar — and heat — infrared. And they’re trying to minimize the distance the plane can be detected by ear and by eye. Minimizring the RCS — the Radar Cross Section — and the heat signature are the two most important factors and end up driving the design process. But it’s tough. For example, to half the radar detection range you must lower the RCS by a factor of six- teen — the fourth root. To lower the IR signature in any meaningful manner you must give up afterburners for your engines and bury the engines inside the airplane to cool the exhaust gases, the sum total of which is less thrust. Consequently we are led kicking and screaming into the world of design compromises, which is a handy catchall for mission compromises, performance and range and payload compromises, bang-and-buck compromises. That’s where you come in.”

Admiral Henry rose from the bench and sauntered along the walk discussing the various methods and techniques that lowered, little by little, the radar and heat signatures of an aircraft. He talked about wing and fuselage shape, special materials, paint, en- gine and inlet duct design and placement, every aspect of aircraft construction. Stealth, he said, involved them all. Finally he fell silent and walked along with his shoulders rounded, his hands thrust deep into his pockets.

Jake spoke. “If the best the air force could get out of their stealth attack plane was A-7 performance, is it a good idea for the navy to spend billions on one? We can’t go buying airplanes to fight just one war. and we need a sufficient quantity of planes to equip the carriers. Five gee-whiz killing machines a year won’t do us any good at all.”

The admiral stopped dead and scrutinized Jake. Slowly a grin lifted the comers of his mouth. “I knew you were the right guy for this job.”

He resumed walking, his step firmer, more confident. “The first question is what kind of fights are we going to get into in the future. And the answer, I suspect, is more of the same. I think the likelihood of an all-out war with the Soviets in Western Europe is pretty small — no way to prevent it from going nuclear and the Russians don’t want that any more than we do. But we must pre- pare to fight it, prepare to some degree, or we can’t deter it. I’d say it’s a lot more likely we’ll end up with more limited wars, like Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf or the Mid- dle East or South Africa. So the capability to fight those wars is critical. We need planes that can fly five hundred miles through a high-density electronic environment, deliver a devastating conven- tional punch, and return to the carrier to fly again, and again and again. Without that capability our carrier battle groups are an ex- pensive liability and not an asset. We need that plane by 1995, at the latest.”

“You’re implying that our plane can’t rely on pinpoint missiles for weapons.”

“Precisely. The air force has a lot of concrete to park their spe- cialized planes on; carrier deck space is damn precious. We can’t build planes that can only shoot missiles that cost a million bucks each, then push them into the drink when we run out of missiles. We have to be able to hit hard in any foreseeable conflict with simple, cheap weapons, like laser-guided bombs.”

“So we can do something the air force couldn’t with the F-117?”

Henry threw his head back and grinned, obviously enjoying him- self. “We aren’t going to trade away our plane’s performance or mission capability.”

“But how—“

“Better design — we learned a lot from the F-117—plus Athena. Active stealth technology.” His mood was gloomy again. “I think the fucking Russians have gotten everything there was to get out of the F-117 and B-2. Every single technical breakthrough, they’ve stolen it. They don’t appear to be using that knowledge and they may not ever be able to do so. This stuff involves manufacturing capabilities they don’t have and costs they can’t afford to incur. But what they can do is figure out defenses to a stealthed-up air- plane, and you can bet your left nut they’re working their asses off on that right this very minute.”

He looked carefully around. ‘There’s a Russian mole in the Pentagon.” His voice was almost a whisper, although the nearest pedestrian was a hundred yards away. “He gave them the stealth secrets. The son of a bitch is buried in there someplace and he’s ripping us off. He’s even been given a top secret code name— Minotaur.” He scuffed his toe at a pebble on the sidewalk. “I’m not supposed to know this. It goes without saying that if I’m not, you sure as hell aren’t.”

“How’d—“

“Don’t ask. I don’t want you to know. But if I know the Mi- notaur’s there, you can lay money he knows we know he’s there. So the bastard is dug in with his defenses up. We may never get him. Probably won’t.”

“How do we know he gave them stealth?”

“We know. Trust me. We know,”

“So we have a mole in the Kremlin.”

“I didn’t say that,” Henry said fiercely, “and you had damn well better not. No shit, Grafton, don’t even whisper that to a living fucking soul.”

They walked along in silence, each man occupied with his own thoughts. Finally Jake said, “So how are we gonna do it?”

“Huh?”

“How are we going to build a stealth Intruder and keep the technology in our pocket?”

“I haven’t figured that one out yet,” Henry said slowly. “You see, everything the Russians have gotten so far is passive — tech- niques to minimize the radar cross section and heat signature. To build a mission-capable airplane like we want we’re going to have to use active techniques. Project Athena. They haven’t stolen Athena yet and we don’t want them to get it.”

“Active techniques?” Jake prompted, unable to contain his curi- osity.

“Wre going to cancel the bad guys’ radar signal when it reaches our plane. We’ll automatically generate a signal that nulli- fies the echo, mutes it, cancels it out. The plane will then be truly invisible to the enemy. They’ll never see it on their scope. They’ll never receive the echo.” He thought about it “It’s the biggest technological breakthrough since the Manhattan Project. Biggest by a mile.”

“I’ve heard speculation about canceling radar signals for years. The guys who were supposed to know all laughed. Can it be done?”

“The party line is no. Impossible. But there’s a crazed genius who wants to be filthy rich that has done it. That technology is the living, beating heart of the ATA. Now all we have to do is get an airplane built and keep them from stealing the secret.”

Jake whistled. “Can’t we put this on all our ships?”

“No doubt we will,” Henry said sourly, “and the Russians will steal it before our first ship gets out of the harbor. For now let’s just see if we can get it in one airplane without someone stealing it. That’ll be plenty for you and Roger Dunedin to chew.”

“Existing aircraft? How about retrofitting them?”

“Right now, as the technology exists, the best approach is to design the plane for it. The power output required to hide a stealthy plane would be very small. The device would be easy enough to put on a ship, when we get the bugs worked out. As usual there are bugs. Expensive, though.”

Admiral Henry glanced at his watch. “Our work’s cut out for us. The air force will want this technology when they get wind of it, and right now everything they see winds up in the Kremlin. It’s not their fault, of course, but that’s the way it is. The manufacturer of our plane will see it and from there it may end up in the Mi- notaur’s clutches. Ditto the ship drivers. And the politicians who have been trick-fucked on the F-117 won’t sit still for more stealth hocus-pocus; they’re gonna want justification for the four or five billion dollars the ATA will require just to develop, and there it goes again. So right now I’m sitting on a volcano that’s about to erupt and my ass is getting damn warm. You see why I wanted you on board.”

“Not really,” Jake said, wondering how far he should push this. After all, who the hell was Jake Grafton? What could an over-the- hill attack pilot in glasses with four stripes on his sleeve do for a three-star admiral? Bomb the Pentagon? “So what’s your plan? How are you going to do this?”

Henry was so nervous he couldn’t hold still. “I’m going to hold the cards real close to my chest and catch peeking over my shoulder. Or that’s what I’m going to try to do, anyway.”

“Admiral, with all respect, sir, what does CNO say about all this?” CNO was the Chief of Naval Operations, the senior uni- formed naval officer.

Henry squared off in front of Jake. “I’m not stupid enough to try to run my own private navy, Captain. CNO knows exactly what I’m doing. So does SECNAV and SECDEF. But you sure as hell didn’t get it all in this little conversation.”

“Admiral, I’ll lay it on the line for you. I’m not going to do anything illegal or tell even one solitary little lie. I’m not a very good liar.”

Admiral Henry grinned. “You just haven’t had the experience it takes. I’ve been single for ten years, so I’ve done a good bit of it. Seriously, all I want you to do is play it straight. Do your job for NAVAIR. Just keep it under your hat that we have an active sys- tem we’re going to put into this bird. Roger will tell you the same.”

“How many people know about this active system?”

“Here in Washington? Eight now — The Secretary of the Navy, CNO, SECDEF. NAVAIR, OP-50—which is Rear Admiral Cos- tello — me, you and Helmut Fritsche. And let’s keep it that way for a while.”

“Have you tested this system? Does it work?”

Henry made a face. “Fritsche’s seen it work on a test bench. Your first job, after you look at the prototypes, is to put part of it into an A-6 and test it on the ground and in flight.”

Jake eyed the older man. He had this sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. There was a hell of a lot he wasn’t being told. “So how do you know Fritsche?”

“He was a professor at Caltech when I was there for a master’s. We became good friends. He did some consulting work for the inventor on some theoretical problems. He saw what the guy had and came to help. That was three years ago. It was coincidence that there was a deputy project manager job opening in the ATA’pro- gram. I talked Fritsche into taking it. He wants to be a part of Athena. The theoretical problems intrigue him.”

The Minotaur

“You said you didn’t know all the players.”

Henry took this opportunity to look around again. “Yeah. I don’t. Your predecessor, Harold Strong? Great guy, knew naval aviation from catapult to tailhook, everything there is to know, but he wasn’t a politician, not a diplomat. He was a blunt, brilliant, take-no-prisoners kind of guy. Somebody killed him.”

“Why?”

“I wish I knew.” Henry described how he personally drove to West Virginia on Saturday morning after the Friday-night automo- bile accident. He summarized the conversation he had had with the West Virginia state trooper who investigated the accident. The trooper had served four years in the marine corps and by a stroke of fortune Henry bad been in uniform. The trooper had been good; he knew murder when he saw it. He had taken the admiral to see the local prosecuting attorney, who had been splitting firewood in his backyard when the two of them arrived in the police cruiser. After two hours of talking. Henry induced the prosecutor and the trooper to agree to a wording of the accident report that did not mention homicide and yet would not preclude a homicide prosecu- tion if the identity of the murderer could ever be established.

“My theory”—Henry shrugged—“I got no evidence, you under- stand — my theory is Harold found out something, teamed some- thing somebody didn’t want him to know — so he got rubbed out.”

The navy Ford pulled up to the curb, but Henry put a hand on Jake’s arm. “This is big, Jake. Real big. You don’t understand how big. The Russians will figure out we’re going to do something dif- ferent and wonderful with the A-12 and they’ll pull out all the stops to get Athena. And five billion dollars in development money is on the line, plus twenty to thirty billion in production money— that much shit will draw every blowfly and bloodsucker in the country. A lot of these people would kill for this technology.”

“Maybe someone already has.”

“Just don’t trust anybody.”

“I’ve figured that out, sir. I think there’s a hell of a lot here you haven’t told me. So I don’t trust you.”

Henry threw back his head and guffawed. “I knew you were the right man for this job.” He became instantly serious. “I don’t give a damn whether you trust me or not. Just do your job and keep your mouth shut and we’ll get the navy a good airplane.”

“By the way, did Strong know about the active system?”

“Yes.”

The admiral’s driver dropped Jake at his office building. One of the few benefits of working a black program was that he could come to work in civilian clothes.

Vice Admiral Dunedin was finishing a conference, so Jake vis- ited with Mrs. Forsythe. In fifteen minutes the door opened and people streamed out, in a hurry.

“Good morning. Admiral,” Jake said.

“How’d your talk go with Admiral Henry?”

“Very well, sir.”

“Don’t lie to me. Captain. I’m your boss.”

“Yessir.” Jake found a seat and looked straight at the blue-eyed Scotsman behind the desk. “He told me what he wanted me to know and that was that”

“How long you been in the navy?”

Long enough to know how to take orders, Jake thought. “Yes- sir.”

“Let’s talk about the A-12. It’s now your baby.”

An hour later the admiral rose from his chair. “Let’s go meet the crew.”

Jake mentioned to the admiral that he had been looking at the personnel folders. “Lieutenant Moravia. She’s got platinum cre- dentials but no experience. How’d she get on the team?”

“Strong wanted her. He was down at Pax River when she went through as a student. He said she’s one of a kind. Since he was a test pilot himself, I figured he had the experience even if she didn’t, so I said okay.”

“I’m not a test pilot,” Jake said.

“I know. These people work for you. If you want someone else, just say so. That goes for any of them, except for Fritsche. If they stay it’s because you think they can do the job and you trust them.”

“I read you loud and clear, sir.”

“Anybody doesn’t pull his weight, or you get goosey about any of them, I’ll have them sitting on the ice cap in the Antarctic so quick they wont have time to pack their long johns,”

The office in Crystal City where the A-12 program team worked was a square space with twenty metal desks jammed in. Five- drawer filing cabinets with combination locks on the drawers had been arranged to divide the room into work areas. The scarred tops and askew drawers of the desks proclaimed them veterans of other offices, other bureaucratic struggles now forgotten. Office equip- ment was scattered all over the room: a dozen computer terminals, four printers, a copy machine, a paper shredder, and a fax machine linked to an encryption device. Jake’s office would be one of the two small private offices. These two small offices each had an out- side window and a blackboard, plus the usual filing cabinets with combination locks on the drawers.

But the security — wow! There were two entry doors, each with cipher locks, and a closed-circuit television that monitored the dead space between the doors. An armed security team was on duty inside twenty-four hours a day. Their business was to check each person entering the space against a master list and log them in and out. The windows had the music sound vibrators and could not be opened. The shades were permanently closed. The fire extin- guisher system in the ceiling had plastic cutouts installed in the pipes so that they would not conduct sound.

“Every sheet of paper is numbered and accounted for,” the ad- miral told Jake. “The phone numbers are unlisted and changed monthly. I can never find my number sheet, so I end up walking down here.”

After a quick tour, Jake stood in the middle of the room with the admiral. “Where’d they get this carpet?”

“Stole it someplace. I never asked.”

“Sure would be nice to get a little bigger space. Thirty people?”

‘This is all the space I have to give you. It takes the signature of an Assistant Secretary of the Navy to get space not assigned to NAVAIR, I haven’t had time to kiss his ass. But if you can get his scrawl, go for it”

“Nothing’s too good for the boys in navy blue,” Toad Tarking- ton chirped cheerfully from his little desk against one wall, loud enough to draw a frosty glance from the admiral.

“You’re Tarkington?” Dunedin said.

“Yessir.”

“I hear you suffer from a mouth problem from time to time- If it’s incurable your naval career is about to hit the wall. You read me?”

“Yessir.”

Dunedin raised his voice. “Okay, folks. Gather around. I want you to meet Captain Jake Grafton, the new program manager. He’s your new boss.” Dunedin launched into a traditional “wel- come aboard” speech. When he was finished Jake told the attentive faces how pleased he was to be there, then he and the admiral shook hands. After a quick whispered word with Fritsche, Dun- edin left the office.

Jake invited the commanders and civilian experts into his new cubbyhole. It was a very tight fit. Folding chairs were packed in and the place became stuffy in minutes. They filled him in on the state of the project and their roles in it. Jake said nothing about his visits with the admirals and gave no hint that he knew anything about the project

He looked over Helmut Fritsche first, the radar expert from Caltech. About fifty, he was heavyset, of medium height, and sported a Hemingway beard which he liked to stroke when he talked. He had alert, intelligent eyes that roamed constantly, even when he was addressing someone. He spoke slowly, carefully, choosing his words. He struck Jake as an intelligent, learned man who had long ago resigned himself to spending most of his life in the company of fools.

George Wilson was at least five years younger than Fritsche and much leaner. He spoke slowly, in cadenced phrases, automatically allowing his listeners to take notes if they wished. When he used his third pun Jake finally noticed. Listening more carefully, he picked up two double entendres and another pun. At first blush Wilson seemed a man in love with the sound of his own voice, but Jake decided that impression didn’t do justice to the fertile, active mind of the professor of aeronautical engineering.

The A-6 bombardier, Commander Les Richards, looked as old as Fritsche although he couldn’t have been a day over forty-two or forty-three. Jake had met him years ago at NAS Oceana. They had never been in the same squadron together but had a speaking ac- quaintance. Richards’ tired face contained tired eyes. Jake remem- bered that just a year or so ago Richards had commanded an A-6 squadron, so this assignment was his post-command tour. His eyes told whoever looked that the navy was no longer an adventure, if indeed it ever had been. The navy and perhaps life itself were experiences to be endured on this long, joyless journey toward the grave. If he caught any of Wilson’s wordplay his face gave no hint. In spite of his demeanor, Jake knew, Richards had the reputation of being an aggressive, competent manager, a man who got things done.

Commander “Smoke” Judy was an F-14 pilot. Like all the com- manders, he had had a squadron command tour. Smoke was short and feisty. He looked like a man who would rather fight than eat The joyous competitive spirit of the fighter pilot seemed incarnate in him. A fire-eater — no doubt that was the origin of his nickname. which had probably ceased to be a nickname long ago. Jake sus- pected that his wife and even his mother now called him Smoke.

Dalton Harris was an extrovert, a man with a ready smile. He grinned nervously at George Wilson’s humor and glanced at him expectantly every time it seemed Wilson might become inspired. He was a lithe, compact man, as full of nervous energy as Judy. An alumnus of the EA-6B Prowler community, he was an expert in electronic warfare- He even had a master’s in electrical engineering from the Naval Postgraduate School.

The other two commanders, Aeronautical Engineering Duty Of- ficers, were equally interesting. Technical competence was their stock-in-trade.

An excellent group, Jake decided as the conversation wound down, good shipmates. Harold Strong and Admiral Dunedin had chosen well. He glanced at his watch with a start; they had been talking about the A-12 for two hours. In parting he told them. “I want a complete inventory of the accountable classified material started tomorrow. Every document will be sighted by two officers and they’ll both sign the list.”

“We did an inventory after Captain Strong died. Took two weeks.”

“You’d better hope I don’t kick the bucket any time soon or you’ll be doing it a couple more times.”

Jake spent five minutes with each of the other officers, saving Moravia and Tarkington for last. He saw them together. After the preliminaries he said, “Miss Moravia, I’m going to be blunt. You don’t seem to have any test-flying experience other than Test Pilot School.”

“That’s right, sir. But I can do the job. Try me and see.”

Moravia was of medium height, with- an excellent figure and a face to match. Subtle makeup, every hair in place. Her gold naval aviator wings gleamed above the left breast pocket of her blue uniform. Try me and see — that fierce self-confidence separated those who could from those who never would.

Tarkington seemed to treat her with deference and respect, Jake noted wryly. “Ever flown an A-6?”

“About two hours or so at Pax River, sir.” Jake knew how that worked. During the course of his training at Test Pilot School— TPS — each student flew anywhere from twelve to seventeen differ- ent kinds of aircraft. The final examination to qualify for gradua- tion consisted of writing a complete flying qualities and perfor- mance evaluation of an airplane the student had not flown before. The student was handed a manual, and after studying it, was al- lowed to fly the airplane for four flights or six hours’ flight time, whichever came first. On the basis of this short exposure the stu- dent then wrote the report. Rita Moravia was an honors graduate of that program.

Try me and seel

“I want you and Tarkington to leave for Whidbey Island tomor- row morning. The folks at VA-128 are expecting you.” VA-128 was the replacement training squadron for A-6 Intruders on the West Coast. “They’re going to give you a crash course on how to fly an A-6. Report directly to the squadron skipper when you get there tomorrow. Mrs. Forsythe in the admiral’s office is getting you or- ders and plane tickets.” He looked again at his watch. “She should have them for you now,”

“Aye aye, sir,” Moravia said and stood up. “Is there anything else, sir?”

“Remember that nobody at Whidbey has a need to know any- thing. You’ll be asked no questions by the senior people. The junior ones will be curious, so just say the Pentagon sent you to fly. That’s it. Learn everything you can about the plane and its mission. And don’t crash one.”

Miss Moravia nodded and left, but Toad lingered.

“Uh, CAG,” Toad said, “I’m a fighter type and this attack, puke stuff—“

“The admiral says that anyone I want to get rid of can winter over in Antarctica. You want to go all the way south?”

“I’ll take Whidbey, sir.”

“I thought you would.” He picked up some paper on his desk and looked at it, signaling the end of the interview. “Oh,” he added, looking up again, “by the way, you stay the hell away from Moravia. Absolutely no romance. Keep it strictly business. You’d mope around here like a whipped puppy after she ditched you. I haven’t got the stomach for another sorry spectacle like that.”

The office emptied at 5:30. Jake stayed, sorting through the paper that had accumulated in Strong’s in basket. Most of it he threw in the waste can under his desk. Memos and letters and position pa- pers that looked important he saved for later scrutiny.

When he finished with the in-basket pile he began rooting through the desk drawers. Unbelievable! Here at the back of the wide, shallow drawer above his knees was an old memo on army stationery, dated 1956. Where had they gotten these desks? And what else was in here? Maybe he would find an announcement from the War Department that Japan had surrendered.

Alas, nothing so extraordinary. A two-year old date book, most of the pages blank. Some matchbooks from a restaurant — perhaps Strong liked to drop in there for a cup of coffee. Three envelopes addressed to Strong in a feminine hand: empty envelopes with the stamp canceled, no return address. One broken shoelace, a button that didn’t look like it came from a uniform, two rubber bands, a collection of government pens and #2 lead pencils. He tried the pens on scrap paper. Most of them still worked. Some of the eras- ers on the pencils were pretty worn.

So Harold Strong had been murdered.

And Admiral Henry had throttled the investigation even before it started. Or so he said.

He shook his head in annoyance. Those problems were not his concern. His job was to run this project. With the A-12 still in the prototype stage, many major decisions remained to be made. Jake already knew where he would throw his weight, what little he had. For too long, in his opinion, the military had been stuck with airplanes designed to accomplish so many disparate missions that they were unable to do any of them well. If they wanted an attack plane, then by God he would argue like hell for a capable attack plane.

Every aircraft design involved inevitable trade-offs: fuel capacity was traded for strength and maneuverability, weapons-carrying ca- pacity sacrificed for speed, maneuverability surrendered for stabil- ity, and so on, because every aircraft had to have all of these things, yet it needed these things in degrees that varied with its mission. But with stealth literally everything was being compro- mised in varying degrees to achieve invisibility, or in the jargon of the trade, survivabihty.

For two hours this afternoon the commanders and experts had argued that a plane that could not survive over the modern battle- field was not worth having. Yet a plane that did survive but could not fight was equally worthless. Somewhere between these two ex- tremes was a balance.

The other major consideration that had been tossed around this affternoon was a conundrum that baffled politicians and generals as well as aircraft designers. What war do you build your airplane to fight? World War III nuclear? World War II conventional? Viet- nam? Anti-terrorist raids against Libya? The answer, Jake be- Keved, had to be all of them. Yet achieving survivability over the European battlefield might well mean trading away conventional iron-bomb-carrying capacity that would be essential in future brushfire wars, like Vietnam. Megabuck smart missiles were cur- rently in vogue but the nation could never afford enough of them to fight any war that lasted longer than two weeks.

This job was not going to be easy, or dull.

“She-it,” Jake Grafton said aloud, drawing the word out slowly. When you looked at Tyler Henry and listened to him he seemed okay. But if all you did was listen to the words — well, it sure did make you wonder. Spies? Murder investigations put on hold? Was Henry some paranoid wacko, some coconut schizo on the naked edge who ought to be locked in the bowels of St. Elizabeth’s with- out his belt and shoelaces?

The first thing I ought to do, Jake told himself, before I go see the ultimate war machine manufactured by some greedy Gyro Gearloose in a garage in California, is check out Henry. It would be nice to know that the big boss has all his marbles. It would be damn nice to know if he doesn’t. Dunedin wanted Jake to salute and march.

“A fellow never gets very far marching in the dark. anyhow,” Jake said aloud. “Too much stuff out there to trip over.”

He used one of the black government pens from Strong’s hoard to write a note for the senior secretary’s desk. What was her name? Mrs. Pulliam. There were just two secretaries, both civilians.

The note informed all and sundry he would be in late tomorrow, after lunch. He had a moment of doubt. There was so much to be done here. Yet they had gotten along without a project manager for two months now; they could suffer through another day.