The Minotaur (15 page)

Strong was divorced, lived alone. What about Callie? Would she
be a target?

Smoke Judy—had he put out the contract on Strong?

George Ludlow . . . Admiral Henry . . . Senator Duquesne
was the tip of the congressional iceberg . . . Seventeen billion dol-
lars, how many jobs did that mean, how many people supporting
families and raising children? Seventeen …

“Jake.” Her voice seemed distant. “Jake, are you still up here?”

He shook himself awake. “Hmhun.”

Her head appeared in the attic access hole. She was standing on
the ladder. “What are you doing up here?”

“Drifted off.” He stirred himself. Rain was smacking against the
roof, a steady drumming sound. He glanced at his watch: 1 A.M.

She came up the ladder and sat down beside him. She
touched the leather of the pistol holster. “Why do you have this
out?”

“Looking through the boxes.” He laid the bolstered pistol in the
nearest open box.

They sat holding hands, listening to the rain. “Jake,” she said, “I
want to adopt that little girL”

“Won’t be easy, Callie. An eleven-year-old veteran of how many
foster homes? She’s had more rocky experiences and picked up
more scars in her short life than you have in yours. Won’t be easy.”

“You’re having problems at work, aren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Bad?”

“I suppose.” He picked up her hand and examined it carefully,
then looked her straight in the eye. “I may be in over my head.”

“Won’t be the first time.”

“That’s true.”

“You’ve always managed to come out in one piece before.”

“That’s the spirit. Good of you to point that out. I see you’ve
taken our talk this morning to heart.” He tried to keep the sarcasm
out of his voice, but some crept in anyway.

She took her hand back, “Jake. Our lives are slipping by. I want
that little girl. I want her now.”

“Okay, Callie-“

“You’re doing what you want to do. I want that little girl.”

“I said okay.”

“Thursday. Thursday morning we see her, then that afternoon
we go to the Department of Social Services for an interview.”

“Okay. I’m leaving town Monday, but I should be back Wednes-
day. I’ll take Thursday off. Just for the record, though, last week I
asked the personnel people to fill out retirement papers for me. I’m
going to tell them to forget it before I leave on Monday.”

“Retirement? Is that what the admiral’s visit today was about.”

“Not really. The retirement thing was the catalyst, maybe. No
kidding, Callie, this may be the worst mess I’ve ever been in. Worse
than Vietnam, worse than the Med last year.”

“You haven’t done anything wrong, have you?”

“Not that I know of. Not yet.”

She got up and moved toward the ladder. “I’m not going to wait
any longer. I want that little girl,” she said, then went down.

Toad Tarkington was sound asleep when the phone rang. He was
still groggy when he picked it up. “Yeah.”

“Tarkington, this is Grafton.”

The cobwebs began to clear. “Yessir.”

“How’re you doing on the flying?”

“Pretty good, sir,”

“Flown any full-system hops yet?”

“Yessir.”

“How’s Moravia doing?”

Toad checked his watch: 12:15 in the morning. It was 3:15 in
Washington. “She’s doing great, sir. Good stick.”

“You doing okay dropping the bombs?”

“Yessir. It’s a little different, but—“

“How many more hops are you going to get?”

“Six, I think. Two each Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. We come
home Wednesday.”

“Stay Wednesday and fly two more hops. Do eight. And Toad,
leave the radar off. I want you to fly all eight without the radar.
Use the IR and the laser and nothing else. You understand?”

“Yessir. Leave the radar off.”

“See you this Friday in the office. And give me a written recom-
mendation Friday on what we can do to the system to make it
easier to use without the radar. Night.” The connection broke. “‘

Toad cradled the dead instrument. He was wide awake. He got
out of bed and went to the window. Raindrops were smearing the
glass. What was that all about? Grafton didn’t seem to be getting
much sleep these days. Shore duty sure wasn’t cracking up right.

He cranked the window open a couple inches. The wind whis-
tled though the crack and chilled mm. It would be a miserable
night to try to get aboard the ship. The meatball would be dancing
like a crazed dervish while the fuel gauge told its sad tale. “Thank
you. Lord, that I ain’t at sea flying tonight,” he muttered, and went
back to bed.

The phone rang again. Toad picked it’up. “Tarkington, sir.”

“Grafton again. Toad. Leave the Doppler off too. It radiates.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Good night. Toad.”

“Good night. Captain.”

8

The plane carrying Jake and
Helmut Fritsche landed at San Francisco International Airport,
where the two men rented a car and ventured forth upon the free-
ways. Fritsche drove since he had made this trip several dozen
times.

“I guess a fair appraisal of Samuel Dodgers would include the
word ‘crackpot,’” Fritsche said as they rolled south toward San
Jose. “Also ‘religious fanatic,’ ’sports fanatic’ and a few more.”

Jake eyed Fritsche, with his graying beard and bushy eyebrows-
“Crackpot?”

”Well, he’s a man of outrageous enthusiasms- Got a Ph.D. in
physics from MIT in one of his prior incarnations, before he got
religion or changed his name to that of his favorite baseball team.
He grew up in Brooklyn, you know.”

“No,” said Jake Grafton through clenched teeth. “I didn’t.”

“Yeah. Anyway, he’s dabbled in computers and radar for years
and patented this technology for suppressing reflected radiation.
He came to me with some technical problems. I used my influence
with the navy to get him a good radar to work with. Had it deliv-
ered in a moving van.” He chuckled. “I’ll tell you that story some-
time.”

“Henry says he’s a genius.”

Fritsche nodded Us agreement between drags on his cigar.
Smoke filled the interior of the car. Jake cracked his window an
inch to exhaust the thick fumes. “He’ll probably be in the running
for a Nobel when his achievements get declassified.”

“Somebody said he’s greedy.”

“Samuel wants some bucks, all right. I can’t condemn him for
that, not after a few years of reading about the pirates of Wall
Street. Dodgers is the founder and only benefactor of his church
and he wants to take it nationwide, with TV and radio and a
hallelujah choir, the whole schmear. I think he realizes that since
he’s so heavy into hellfire and damnation, contributions are going
to be light. The feel-good, be-happy ministries are the ones rolling
in the dough. Dodgers is going to have to keep his afloat out of his
own pocket.”

Jake Orafton arranged the collar of his civilian jacket around his
neck and lowered the window another inch. “What did George
Ludlow say when he heard about Dr. Dodgers?”

“Amen,” Fritsche said lightly.

“I believe it,” Jake muttered. His companion tittered good-na-
turedly.

The car rolled on into the farm district south of San Jose. Even-
tually Fritsche turned up a dirt driveway and parked in front of a
ramshackle wooden structure. A large sign amid the weeds pro-
claimed: “Faith Apostolic Gospel Tabernacle.”

“I think we ought to get down on our knees inside and pray the
GAO never gets wind of this,” Jake said as he surveyed the weeds
and the fading whitewash on the old structure. The last coat of thin
whitewash had been applied over a still legible Grange hall sign.

“You’ll see,” Fritsche assured him.

Samuel Dodgers was a stringy man in constant motion. He stood
in the small, dusty chapel and tugged at this, gestured at that, reset
the Dodgers baseball cap on his balding dome for the hundredth
time, pulled at his trousers or ear or nose or lower lip, moving,
always moving. “So you fellows wanta see it again, huh, and see
what progress looks like in the late twentieth century? When do I
get some money?”

“You got your last check two weeks ago.”

“I mean the next one.” He hitched up his pants and reset his cap
and looked from face to face expectantly. The sunlight coming
through a dirty windowpane fell on a long, lean face. His chin
jutted outward from almost nonexistent lips. Above the grim
mouth was a sharp nose and two restless black eyes. “The next
check—when?”

“I think it’s a couple months away,” Fritsche replied gently.

“If I weren’t a Christian I’d cuss you government people. Your
tax people squeeze the juice right out of a man—a man who’s
sitting on the biggest advancement in military technology since the
horseshoe—but the giving hand is so all-fired parsimonious, stingy,
miserly. You people are just cheapl”

“You’re being paid according to the contract you agreed to. Dr.
Dodgers.”

“Get a man over a barrel and squeeze him. It’s a sin to take
advantage of a man trying to do the Lord’s work like I am. A sin.”

Jake glanced at Helmut Fritsche. He appeared unperturbed.

Dodgers led them between a dozen or so folding chairs toward
the door near the altar. “Praise the Lord and pass the ammuni-
tion,” Fritsche muttered just loud enough for Jake to hear above
the tramping and scraping of heavy feet on the wooden floor.

The back half of the old Grange hall was a well-lit workshop.
Several strings of naked hundred-watt bulbs were woven through
the joists and cast their light on a crowded jumble of workbenches,
tools and junk. The visitors picked their way through it behind
Dodgers, who approached the only person in the place, a young
roan of about twenty with carrot-red hair and acne to match.

“My boy Harold,” Dodgers said to Jake, who shook the offered
hand and introduced himself- “Harold was at Stanford, but they
weren’t teaching him anything, so he came back here to work with
me. Learn more here with me than he would in that Sodom of little
minds. Those fools with their calculators, always saying that some-
thing won’t work . . .” He continued to fulminate as he opened
the large doors at the back end of the building and began stringing
electrical cords. “Well, Helmut, you seen this done before. Don’t
just stand there like a tourist”

Dodgers drew Jake aside as Fritsche and Harold hooked up
electrical cords and moved a workbench outside. “Okay.” He
cleared his throat “Over there on that little bench below those
trees” he pointed at the side of a hill about a half mile away—“is
the radar. Harold will run that. That’s the radar the navy loaned
me. Got it up there in an old two-holer that used to be here behind
the tabernacle.” He stopped and showed Harold exactly how he
wanted the power cables connected.

Jake joined him at a workbench. “Now this little radar suppres-
sor—it picks up the incoming signal on these three antennas here
and feeds it into this computer over there. Got four of the fastest
chips made in this thing—Harold did most of the computer design.
Computers are his bag. Little hobby of mine too. Anyway, the
computer analyzes the incoming signal: strength, frequency, direc-
tion, PRF—that’s Pulse Repetition Frequency—and so forth, and
generates a signal that goes out through these companion antennas
to muffle out future signals. That’s why these antennas are twins.
You have a receiver and a transmitter.” “

“But you can’t suppress the first signal coming in?”

“Nope. They get one free look. The very first incoming pulse will
not be muffled. Nor, in this generation of this device, will the
second. See, you can’t get a pulse repetition frequency until you
have received at least two pulses, which you must have to time
your outgoing pulses, the muffling pulses. But with existing radars,
the return from one pulse will be treated like static. The cathode-
ray tubes need a lot more pulses than that.”

“And when the guy painting you stops transmitting, you beacon
one more time?”

“That’s the problem Harold and I are working on right now-
You see, after the first pulse comes in, and the second, the com-
puter then has to figure it all out and start transmitting. Right now
we’ve got the computing time down to about ten billionths of a
second. That’s not enough of a clean chirp to let any existing radar
get a definable return. If the next pulse doesn’t arrive right on time,
we’ll stop the muffling pulses ten nanoseconds later. Just need to
fix the software, the XY dipole and . . .” His voice fell to an
incoherent mumble.

“Why wouldn’t a second radar that is in a receive-only mode see
you beaconing to the first radar?”

“Bistatic radar? It would,” said the genius in jeans, “if all we
were doing was pulsing straight back at the transmitter. But we
aren’t. We’re pulsing from a series of antennas all over the plane to
neutralize the reflected signal. Knowing how much to radiate, pre-
cisely enough yet not too much, that’s where the computer really
makes this thing work. First you must know the exact reflective
characteristics of the object you are trying to protect—that’s your
airplane—and put that data into the computer’s memory. Then the
computer calculates the scatter characteristics of the incoming sig-
nal and tells each of the two hundred transmitters positioned over
the fuselage and wings and tail just bow much to radiate. All of the
transmitters have to radiate in all directions. And this whole thing
has to work very, very quickly. No computer was fast enough to
handle this until superconductivity came along. See, to make the
electrical signals move along fast enough to make this work, I’ve
had to super-cool my computer in a tank of liquid hydrogen and
encase the wires to each of die antennas in this special sheathing.
That lowers the resistance just enough.” He gestured to a row of
pressure bottles that stood in one corner of his workshop. “Still,
there’s so much computing involved we had to go to a distributed
system with multiple CPUs.”