The Minotaur (17 page)

9

Terry Franklin stood with his
back against a pillar and tried to keep his face pointed at Lincoln’s
Second Inaugural Address. The pillar was the second one on the
right after you came through the main entrance. The man on the
phone had been very precise about that. Second pillar on the right,
on the side toward the Inaugural Address.

His eyes kept moving. He was nervous, so nervous. He had vom-
ited up his breakfast an hour ago . . . Not that person, a teenage
girl. Not that old fat woman with the cane and the two kids.
Maybe that man in the suit over there . . . he could be FBI. Was
he looking this way? Why was he turning? That long-haired guy in
jeans . . .

He had been here ten minutes and had already spotted five men
who could be FBI. Maybe they all were. What if they had him
staked out, like a goat? Maybe he should just leave, walk away and
forget all of this. He had plenty of money. Enough. He had
enough. If they weren’t on to him he could live carefully and com-
fortably for years with no one the wiser. But what if they knew?

“It’s one of the world’s great speeches, isn’t it?”

He turned and stared. A man, in his fifties with a tan face,
stocky, wearing a short jacket, looking at the speech carved in the
marble. On his head a brimmed hat. What’s the response? Holy
. . . think! “Yeah . . - uh, but I think the Gettysburg Address is
better.”

“Stay twenty feet or so behind me.” The man turned and walked
for the entrance, not fast, not slow, just walking. After he had gone
three paces Terry Franklin could wait no longer and followed.

The man was only ten feet ahead going down the wide, broad
steps in front of the Memorial. Franklin forced himself to slow
down and lag behind. The distance had increased to fifteen feet by
the time they reached the sidewalk, but it narrowed again as
Franklin strode along. He stood right behind the man as he waited
for a tour bus to roll by.

On the other side of the street the man said, “Walk beside me.”
He led Terry along the north side of the Reflecting Pool until he
found an empty bench. “Here,” he said.

“Can’t we go somewhere private?” Franklin asked, still on his
feet and looking around in all directions.

“This is private. Sit!” The petty officer obeyed. “Look at me.
‘ Stop looking around. You’re as nervous as a schoolboy smoking his
first cigarette.”

“Something went wrong. Really wrong. Why in hell did you
people have a drop in a black ghetto? Some nigger doper could
have torn my head off over there.”

“The drops were selected in Moscow, from a list. That drop was
originally chosen for another agent.” The man shrugged, resigned,
“Bureaucrats. These things happen.”

“So who got the message? Answer me that! Who saw me there?
The cops? The FBI? NIS?” The pitch of his voice started rising.
“What am I supposed to do now? Wait until—“

“No one saw you. Some child or derelict probably removed the
cigarette pack, or it was blown out of the hole by the wind. If you
had been observed they would be tailing you now.”

Franklin couldn’t help himself He turned his head quickly,
scanning.

“Sit still! You only call attention to yourself by doing that, and
believe me, there is nothing to see. You are clean. I wouldn’t be
here if you weren’t.”

Franklin stared at his feet. He was so miserable. “I called in sick
today.”

“And you rode the subways just as we instructed, and we
checked you all the way. No one followed. No one pulled up to
Metro stations to see if you got off. No one made phone calls or ran
for a car after you passed by. You are clean. You are not being
watched.”

“So who are you?”

“You don’t need—” He took a deep breath and exhaled slowly.
“My name is Yuri.” The man extracted a pack of cigarettes from
an inside jacket pocket and lit one. Mariboro Gold 100s, Franklin
noticed. The fingers that held the cigarette were thick, the nails
short. No rings.

“So what do you want me to do?”

“I’m here to evaluate you, to see if you are capable of going on,
of continuing to serve.”

Franklin thought about it. Lucy hadn’t spoken to him for four
days now. God only knows what that bitch will do. Still, ten thou-
sand bucks a disk was damn good money. And if …

“If you wish to continue, you must calm down. You must get a
grip on yourself.” Yuri’s voice was low and steady. “Your greatest
asset is that no one suspects you, and if you become nervous, irra-
tional, irritable, not your usual self, then you call attention to your-
self and make yourself suspect. Do you understand?”

“Yes.” He glanced at the man, who was looking at him carefully
with inquisitive, knowing eyes. Franklin averted his gaze.

“We’ll give you a rest,” Yuri said. “We’ll wait a few months
before we give you another assignment. Will that help?”

Terry Franklin was torn. He wanted the money, quickly, but as
he sat here on this bench knowing they could be watching he knew
Just how close he was to the end of his emotional rope. For the first
time in his life he realized how little real courage he had. But for
this kind of money maybe he could screw up enough stuff to keep
going, for a while at least. If he had some time. He rubbed his eyes,
trying to quell the tic in his left eyelid- “Yes,” he said slowly,
“perhaps it would be better to let things cool off, settle down.”

“0kay- So tomorrow you go back to work as usual. Do all the
usual things, all the things you normally do. Keep to your routine.
Do nothing out of the ordinary. Be pleasant to your colleagues.
Can you manage that?”

He considered it, visions of the office and the chief flashing be-
fore his eyes, fear welling up.

“Yes?”

“Yes.” He got it out.

“Do you want to talk about anything else?”

He shook his head no.

“You are doing important work. You have made a great contri-
bution. Your work is known in Moscow.”

Terry Franklin said nothing. Of course his work was known in
Moscow. Just as long as no one here found out about it, everything
would be fine. Ensuring that that didn’t happen was the whole
problem.

“To show you how valuable your work is, we are raising your
pay. To eleven thousand a disk.”

Franklin just nodded. The enormity of the risks he was running
to earn that money had finally sunk in the last four days- He no
longer thought of it as easy money. He was earning every goddamn
dime.

“You may leave now. Walk up Twenty-third Street to the Foggy
Bottom Metro station and board there. Goodbye.”

Terry Franklin rose and walked away without a backward
glance.

“How long you guys gonna be in town?” the driver of the rental
car shuttle bus asked George Wilson as they circled Terminal C at
Dallas-Fort Worth to pick up more people.

“Oh, a day or so.”

“Going home then?”

“No. We’ve got a couple more cities to visit.” Inquisitive devil,
Jake thought, sitting beside George and watching people board.

“Did you come here from home?” Maybe the driver was work-
ing for a tip. Or maybe he was just bored. He got the bus in motion
again as the people who had just boarded tried to store their bags
in the bin and hold on too.

“Nope. Came from L.A. Been on the road a while.”

“I knew it! You’re a traveling salesman, huh?”

“Yep.”

“I can always tell.”

At TRX Industries the six men were passed from person to person
until they reached the program manager. His ample gut hung over
a wide leather belt secured with a Budweiser buckle. At least it
appeared to be a Budweiser buckle, but it would be impossible to
know for sure unless you checked while you were shining his cow-
boy boots. His name was Harry Franks.

After the introductions and how-are-yous, he said, “Do you
guys want to see it right now, or go to the conference room and
watch the video presentation first?” He eyed Jake.

“I’d just as soon see the plane now.”

“For sure. Maybe see the presento during lunch. We worked real
hard on it. You fellas follow me.”

As they strolled along he bantered with Wilson and the com-
manders, whom he called by name. Just a bunch of good ol’ boys.

The plane was in the hangar. The design seemed to Jake Grafton
to be more conventional than Consolidated’s. This plane had a
tandem cockpit and twin vertical stabilizers canted in at the top,
toward each other, but there the similarity to the other prototype
stopped. This bird was tactical navy gray, with engine intakes in
the wing roots and no canards. Instead of a plenum chamber and
fairings to cool the exhaust, the tailpipes were arranged above a
fairing that might shield the worst of the heat signature from a
ground observer. There were no afterburners. “The Soviets are
doing a lot of work on air-to-air IR sensors for their latest genera-
tion MiGs,” Smoke Judy said.

“Yeah, probably stole ours,” somebody grumbled.

Jake walked slowly around the plane, the chief engineer at his
elbow. On the left side of the fuselage, just behind the nose radome,
was a place from which a twenty-millimeter-cannon barrel peeked
out “Vulcan?”

“Yep. Six hundred fifty rounds capacity, five hard points for
missiles and bombs faired in underneath. This baby’d carry, shoot
or drop anything in the U.S. inventory or anything any NATO
country’s got.”

“Range?”

“Combat radius is projected at six hundred nautical miles un-
refueled.”

“How stealthy is this thing?”

“Well,” said Harry Franks with his thumbs in his belt, “it’s got a
head-on RCS of about a half of a square meter. That reduces its
detection range compared with an A-6 Intruder by about forty-five
percent. That’s naked, as she sits. Hang bombs and a belly tank
and the RCS rises, though it’s still down about sixty percent from
an A-6 loaded for bear. Our design concept was to be as stealthy as
possible and still come up with a mission-capable attack plane with
good range and flying characteristics. This prototype was opti-
mized for aircraft-carrier operations. It seemed to us that if you
guys couldn’t get it aboard ship and keep it there for a reasonable
cost, it didn’t matter how stealthy it was.” He sighed and scratched
his head and checked the shine on the toe of his boots, “That logic
didn’t impress the air force, of course. Not stealthy enough for
them by a long shot”

“What’s this thing gonna cost Uncle Sam?” Jake already knew
this answer, but he wanted to hear Franks say it

“Well, tbere’re a ton of variables.” Franks’s hands went into his
pockets and he looked Jake straight in the eyes- “Optimum pro-
duction rates, as is, fifty-three mil.”

“When did you stop selling used cars and go to work for TRX?”
Franks chuckled good-naturedly.

“If it were something under fifty, I could probably bring my wife
over and let her drive it”

The engineer’s grin disappeared. “I hear you. You’ll get some
votes in Congress under fifty that you won’t get over that number.
But we already scraped and cut and chopped like hell to get down
to fifty-three.”

“Uh-huh. Just a suggestion—we’re a long way from a decision—
but were I you, I’d be sweating that number again and trying to
shrink it Sweating it real hard.”

Later Jake managed to draw Dalton Harris aside. Harris had
spent most of his career in electronic warfare. By definition he was
an expert on Soviet radars, their capabilities and their usage. Tell
me,” Jake asked, ”what a forty-five percent reduction in the detec-
tion range of an A-6 means to the Soviets. Over fifty percent reduc-
tion carrying weapons.”

“It means that all the Soviet fire-control radars are obsolete.” He
shrugged. “They would have to redesign and replace everything
they have. Or—and this is a big or—they would have to double the
number of existing radars.”

“At what cost?”

“Replacement would be astronomical. Their whole system in-
volves using proven technology that can be manufactured in quan-
tity at low cost by low-skilled workers with inexpensive equipment
and techniques. They need a lot of everything since the Soviet
military is so big. Has to be big because the country is; distances
are mind-boggling. So they rarely declare anything obsolete until
it’s worn out completely. Yet in a mass obsolescence like this low-
observable technology threatens, they have to come up with new
cutting-edge designs or fixes for over a dozen types of front-line
radars, manufacture huge quantities and get them all in service
quickly.” Harris raised his bands and dropped them in a gesture of
defeat “I don’t think they can do it. It’ll cost too much. Their best
bet is to merely make a lot more of what they have, but that will
cost them the farm and the family cow. All of which is why
Gorbachev has become a good guy.”

“You think?”

“Look at it this way- The Soviet economy is on its ass. They
don’t even have money over there. The ruble is non-convertible.
They’ve been spending at least an eighth of their gross national
product on defense. The barrel is empty. They hate Star Wars
because the research and development costs to match or counter it
are prohibitive. Now comes stealth: the B-2, the F-117. Those are
threats against land-based targets. If that wasn’t enough bad news,
now the U.S. Navy wants a stealth bird to threaten their fleet—the
A-12. I’ll bet if we were on the Politburo and heard what coun-
tering this low-observable technology was going to cost, we’d think
about converting to Christianity.”

“They must be looking hard for a way to do it on the cheap,”
Jake suggested.

“Wouldn’t surprise me.” Dalton Harris replied.

“Why not build their own stealth birds?”

“They will someday. Right now they can’t afford it. When they
do, though, we’ll have to upgrade all our radars.”

“Hell, we can’t afford it either,” Jake Grafton said. Franks was
walking this way. When he was close enough Jake said to him,
“Let’s sit down and talk about the flight-test schedule.”