The Minotaur (12 page)

Even though the practice bombs lacked laser seekers, the laser in
the nose turret would give the computer more precise range and
angular information than the radar could. Rita was equally busy
flying the plane and centering the steering commands on the Ana-
log Display Indicator, the ADI, immediately in front of her.

The infrared and laser stayed locked to the radar reflector on the
slittle tower that constituted the target bull’s-eye even after bomb
release as the nose turret rotated. In the cockpit Toad watched the
picture on the infrared display change as the plane passed over the
target. He was looking at an inverted picture of the tower when he
IBW the puff of smoke near the base sent up by the practice bomb.
An excellent hit.

On the downwind leg Toad raised his helmet visor and swabbed
his face with his gloved hands. This was work. The plane was
headed west parallel to the Columbia River. Rita scanned the sky
for light aircraft.

“832, your hit twenty-five feet at six o’clock.”

“Roger.” Toad made a note on his kneeboard. “On the next
run,” he said to Rita, “let’s do 500 knots.”

“Okay.”

At the increased speed Toad had only about sixty-five seconds
from the IP to bomb release, so he had to work faster. The plane
bounced in the warm afternoon thermals. In wartime the plane
would race in toward its target at full throttle. The air could be full
CS flak and enemy radar signals probing the darkness to lock them
up for a missile shot. Today over this Oregon prairie under a bril-
liant sun. Toad could visualize how it would be. Sweat trickled
down his forehead and into his eyes as he manipulated the switches
and knobs of the equipment. He got the bomb off but he was
struggling. He would need a lot of practice to gain real proficiency,
and today the equipment was working perfectly, no one was shoot-
ing.

“A thousand feet this time, as fast as shell go.”

“Roger,” Rita said.

As fast as she’ll go turned out to be 512 knots indicated. On the
next run they came in at five hundred feet, then four hundred, then
three.

On the downwind leg before their last run. Toad flipped the
radar switch from transmit to standby. The picture disappeared
from the scope. A stealth bomber that beaconed its position with
radar emissions would have a short life and fiery end. The infrared
was passive, emitting nothing.

As they crossed the IP inbound. Toad found the infrared was
still on the bull’s-eye tower. With the help of the inertial, the com-
puter had kept the cursors there and the infrared was slaved to the
cursors. He turned the laser on early and stepped the computer
into attack.

Yes, it could be done, and with practice, done well. Moisture in
the air would degrade the 1R, of course, but you couldn’t have
everything.

As they crossed the Columbia climbing northwest, the spotting
tower gave them a call. “We didn’t spot your last hit. Maybe the
smoke charge didn’t go off.”

Toad checked the computer readouts. Rita had been eleven mils
off on steering at the moment of weapon release. Toad couldn’t
resist. He informed her of that fact. She said nothing- “Still,” Toad
added magnanimously, “an okay job.” He was feeling rather
pleased with himself.

“For a woman.”

“I didn’t say that. Miss Thin Skin. I said an okay job.”

“Look at the ordnance panel, ace.” Toad did so. He had inadver-
tently selected Station Three instead of Station Four for the last
bomb run. The practice bombs were on Station Four, and the last
bomb was undoubtedly still there. Station Three—the belly station
—had been empty, thank God! Oh damn. And good ol’ Rita had
sat there and watched him do it and hadn’t squeaked a word! “Call
Center and get our clearance back to Whidbey,” she said now, her
voice deadpan.

Toad reached for the radio panel.

Terry Franklin was watching television when he heard the tele-
phone ring. He listened for the second ring, but it didn’t come. He
sat staring at the TV screen, no longer hearing the words or seeing
the picture-

His wife had taken the kids to the mall. She had left only a half
hour ago. How long would she be?

He was trying to decide just how much time he had when the
phone rang again. He felt his muscles tense. Only one ring.

He turned off the TV and got his coat from the closet. He felt in
his pocket for the keys to the old Datsun. They were there. He
snapped off the living-room lights and peered between the curtains
at the street. No one out there.

Ring, pause, ring, pause, ring . . .

Three rings. The drop on G Street. He would have to hurry to
beat Lucy and the kids home. He remembered to lock the door
behind him.

Matilda Jackson was sixty-seven years old and she was fed up. Five
years ago she retired from the law firm where she had worked as a
clerk-typist for twenty-six years. Seventeen months ago she had
made the last payment on her mortgage. The house wasn’t much—
a run-down row house in a run-down neighborhood—but by God
it was hers. And it was all she could afford on her social security
income and the $93.57 she got every month from the law firm’s
pension plan.

The house had been something when she and Charlie bought it
in 1958, and Charlie had been a good worker inside and outside,
keeping everything painted and nice and the sidewalk swept. But
he had died of diabetes—had it really been sixteen years ago?—
after they amputated his feet and his liver got bad.

Poor Charlie, thank God he can’t see this neighborhood now,
it’d break his heart. Everything gone to rack and ruin, trash every-
where, and those kids selling dope in the house right across the
street, the house where ol’ lady Melvin, the preacher’s widow, used
to live. Some old man from New Orleans was in there now; she
didn’t know his name.

Mrs. Jackson heard a car stop outside and peered through the
window. Four young men dressed fit to kill stood on the sidewalk
looking around. Mrs. Jackson reached for her camera, an ancient
Brownie, but she had loaded it with some of that new film the man
at the drugstore said would take pictures without a flash. When she
got the camera ready and pointed through the gap in the drapes
She could see only two men. The other two must have gone inside.

Damn those cops anyway.

She had told those detectives that Melvin’s was a crack house
and nothing had happened. They weren’t going to pay much atten-
tion to a fat old black lady, no way. She had seen that in their hard
eyes as they looked up and down the street at the boarded-up
windows and the trash and that worthless, shiftless Arnold Spivey
sitting on Wilson’s stoop drinking from a bottle in a paper bag.

She was going to get pictures. They would have to do something
if she had pictures. And if they didn’t do anything, she would send
the photos to that neighborhood watch group or maybe even the
newspapers. Leaving old people to watch their neighborhood rot
and the dope peddlers take over—they would have to do some-
thing about pictures.

She snapped the camera at the two men on the sidewalk, slick
loose-jointed dudes with sports coats and pimp hats with wide
brims and flashy hatbands. The license plate of that big car would
be in both photos.

Here comes someone. A white man, walking bold as brass after
dark in a neighborhood as black as printer’s ink, a neighborhood
where the kids would rip off your arm to get your Timex watch.
She squinted. Late fifties or early sixties, chunky, wearing a full-
length raincoat and a little trilby hat. Oh yes, he went by earlier
this evening, just walking and looking. She hadn’t paid much at-
tention then, but here he is, back again. She pointed the camera
and clicked the shutter. The two dudes on the opposite sidewalk by
the big car were watching him, but he was ignoring them.

Now what did he just do? Stuffed something in that hollow iron
fence post as he walked by.

Why did he do that? My God, the street is full of trash; why
didn’t he just throw it down like everyone else does?

The two men who had gone into the crack house came out and
they and their compatriots piled in the car and left, laughing and
peeling rubber. Mrs. Jackson got more photos of them, then busied
herself in the kitchen making tea since the street seemed quiet now.

She was sipping tea in the darkened living room and looking
through the curtain gap when a haggard black woman in dilapi-
dated blue jeans and a torn sweatshirt staggered around the corner
and along the sidewalk to the crack house. She struggled up the
steps to the stoop. The door opened before she even knocked. Mrs.
Jackson didn’t bother taking her picture; she was one of the regu-
lars, a crack addict who Mrs. Jackson suspected didn’t have long
to live. Mrs. Blue next door had said her name was Mandy and she
had heard she was doing tricks under the Southeast Freeway.

Nobody gave a damn. About Mandy or Mrs. Jackson or Mrs.
Blue or any of them. Just a bunch of poor niggers down in the
sewer.

Wonder what that white roan stuffed in that fence post? Some-
thing to do with that crack house, no doubt Maybe he’s a judge or
police on the take. Not getting enough. Maybe it’s money, a payoff
for someone.

Well, well just see. We’ve got some rights too.

She pulled her sweater around her shoulders and got her cane.
Her arthritis was bothering her pretty badly but there was no help
for it She unbolted the door and lowered herself down the steps.
As she approached the hollow iron post two houses down she
glanced around guiltily. Her frustration was fast evaporating into
fear. No one looking. Quick! She reached into the post. Only a
crushed cigarette pack. Disappointed, she felt around in the hollow
cavity. There was nothing else. With the cigarette pack in her
pocket, she slowly made her way back to her house, steeling herself
to look straight ahead. Oh God, why had she done this?

She locked and bolted her doors and sat at the kitchen table
examining her find. Writing on the back, block letters. Numbers
and such. Code of some sort. Payoffs, most likely. We’ll see what
the police make of all this. Not that they’d ever tell an old black
woman what it’s all about. No matter, if they’d just close that
crack house, that’d be something.

But should she go to the police? They’ve been told about that
crack house and they’ve done nothing. What if the police have
been paid off? What if they tell the dopers about her?

Mrs. Jackson had lived too long in the ghetto not to know the
dangers associated with interfering in someone else’s illegal enter-
prise. As she stared at the cigarette pack she realized she had
crossed that invisible line between officious nuisance and enemy.
And she knew exactly what happened to enemies of dope dealers.
They died. Fast and bloody. Those four punks on the sidewalk in
their fancy clothes would smile as they cut off her ears, nose and
tongue, then her arms.

She turned off the kitchen light and sat in the darkness, trying to
think. What should she do? My God, what had she done?

Mrs. Jackson was still sitting in the darkness of her kitchen thirty
minutes later when Terry Franklin walked past the front of her
house toward the hollow post. He had parked the car three blocks
away. Normally he was very circumspect and drove around for at
least an hour to make sure that he had lost any possible tails, but
tonight he was in a hurry. He had to get home before Lucy and the
kids got back from the mall. So he had driven straight from An-
oandale to G Street.

The block appeared empty. No, there was someone sitting in a
doorway, across the street. Some black guy with a brown bag. A
wino. No sweat. What a shitty neighborhood! He had never under-
stood why the Russians had picked a drop in a run-down black
neighborhood, but since he hadn’t talked to them after he had
found the described drops, he had had no opportunity to ask.

It would be just his luck to get mugged down here some night.

He walked at a regular pace toward the post, not too fast and
not too slow. Just a man who knows where he’s going. He would
just reach in while barely breaking stride, get the cigarette pack
and keep on walking, right on around the block and back to his
car. Piece of cake.

He slowed his pace as he reached into the post.

It was empty!

Dumbfounded, he stopped and looked in. There was just enough
light coming from the streetlight up on the corner and the windows
of the houses to see into the hole. It was about four inches deep.
Empty!

He walked on. What had happened? This had never happened
before. What in hell was going on?

He turned and walked back to the post. He looked in again. The
hole was still empty. He looked around on the sidewalk and the
grass behind the fence for anything that might be an empty ciga-
rette pack.

Nothing!

It must be here, somewhere, and he just wasn’t seeing it.

He was living one of those cold-sweat gibbering nightmares
where you are stuck in quicksand and going to die and the rope is
forever just inches out of reach. Finally he realized the cigarette
pack truly wasn’t there.

Maybe he was being set up. Maybe the FBI was going to grab
him.

Franklin looked around wildly, trying to see who was watching.
Just blank windows. The wino—still there, sucking from his bottle.
He reached into the hole again, trying to understand. Someone had
gotten it. God, it must be the FBI. They must be on to him. Even
now, they’re watching from somewhere, ready to pounce. Prison—
he would go to prison. The wino—an agent—watching and laugh-
ing and ready to arrest him.

Terry Franklin panicked.

He ran for the car, a staggering hell-bent gallop down the side-
walk as he tried to look in every direction for the agents closing in.

To arrest him.

He careened into a garbage can and it fell over with a loud clang
and the lid flew off and garbage went everywhere. He kept running.