The Minotaur (34 page)

“It’s a miracle that the navy even owns a rowboat,” Grafton
remarked one day to Admiral Dunedin.

‘True, but the Russians are more screwed up than we are. They
manage every single sector of their economy like this, not just the
military. You can’t even buy toilet paper in a store over there.”

“The bureaucrat factor is a multiplier,” Jake decided. “The
more people there are to do paperwork, the more paper there is to
be worked and the slower everything goes, until finally the wheels
stop dead and only the paper moves.”

“The crap factor: it’s a law of physics,” Dunedin agreed.

Jake took a briefcase full of unclassified material home every
night, and after Callie and Amy were in bed he stayed awake until
midnight scribbling notes, answering queries, and reading replies
and reports prepared by his staff.

He spent countless hours on the budget, trying to justify every
dollar he needed for the next fiscal year. He had to make assump-
tions about where the ATA program would be then, and then he
had to justify the assumptions. Athena was still buried deep, out-
side the normal budgetary process. Still he would need staff and
travel money and all the rest of it. He involved everyone he could
lay hands on and cajoled Admiral Dunedin into finding him two
more officers and another yeoman. He didn’t have desks for them.
They had to share.

But things were being accomplished. A Request for Proposal
(RFP) on the Athena project was drafted, chopped by everyone up
and down the line, committeed and lawyered and redrafted twice
and finally approved. Numbered copies went by courier to a half
dozen major defense contractors who were believed to have the
technical facilities and staff to handle development of a small
superconducting computer for aviation use. The office staff had to
be informed, and this had been done by the admiral.

Inevitably the number of people who knew about Athena and
what it could do was expanding exponentially. Access was still
strictly need-to-know, but the system ensured that a great many
people had the need, or could claim they did, citing chapter and
verse of some regulation or directive no one else had ever read or
even seen.

Callie was understanding about the time demands Jake faced.
She had spent enough years as a navy wife to know how the service
worked. Amy was less so. She and Carrie were still going round
and round, and she found Jake a pleasant change. He made rules
and he enforced them, and he tucked her into bed every night. She
wanted more of his time and he had precious little to give. The
weekends became their special time together.

“Why do you spend so much time at work. Jake?”

“It’s my job. I have to.”

‘I’m not going to have a job Hke yours. I’m going to get a job
that gives me plenty of time to spend with my little girl.”

“Are you my little girl?”

“No. I’m Amy. I’m not anybody’s little girl. But I’m going to
have a little girl of my own someday.”

“Do you ever think much about those somedays? What they’ll
be like?”

“Sure. I’ll have lots of money and lots of time and a very nice
little girl to buy stuff for and spend time with.”

“How are you going to get lots of money if you don’t spend
much time earning it?”

“I’m going to inherit it. From you and Callie.”

“Guess we’d better work hard then.”

One day in early May, Special Agent Lloyd Dreyfus made an ap-
pointment to see Luis Camacho’s boss, P. R. Bigelow, without
telling Camacho. He had thought about it for a week before he
made the appointment with the secretary, and then he had two
more days to wait Jumping the chain of command was as grievous
a sin in the FBI as it was in the military, yet he had decided to do it
anyway and to hell with what Camacho or anyone else thought. As
the day and hour approached, however, the enormity of his trans-
gression increased with each passing hour. Surely Bigelow would
understand. Even if he didn’t, he must realize Dreyfus had a right
and duty to voice his concerns.

Dreyfus rehearsed his speech carefully. It wasn’t technically a
speech: perhaps a better description would be “short, panicky
monologue.” He had to justify himself as soon as he opened his
mouth, get Bigelow’s sympathetic attention before he had a chance
to start quoting the regulations, before he lost his cool and went
ballistic. Was Bigelow a ballistic kind of guy? Dreyfus couldn’t
recall Camacho ever saying.

He tried to recall everything he had ever heard about P. R.
Bigelow, and that wasn’t much. Strange, when you stopped to
think about it Camacho never mentioned his superior officer, never
said, “Bigelow wants this,” or “Bigelow is pleased,” or “Bigelow
says blah-blah.” Come to think of it, Camacho never talked about
anyone. If the Director himself told Luis Camacho to do thus and
so, Camacho would just tell Dreyfus, “Do this” or “Do that.” He
sometimes said what he hoped to find or achieve, but he never even
hinted who had told him to cause something to happen, or why it
was to happen. He never expressed a personal opinion. Curious as
hell. Camacho was one weird duck, beyond a reasonable doubt.

Sitting in Bigelow’s reception area with the secretary checking
him out surreptitiously as she did her nails, Dreyfus went over his
list one more time. He wanted everything right on the tip of his
tongue. It would be worse than disastrous to think of the clincher
on the way to the surgery in the dungeon. Once again he assured
himself he was doing the right thing. The right thing. Doing the
right thing. He fondled his pipe in his pocket as if it were a set of
worry beads.

The ten-button phone on the nail polisher’s desk buzzed to at-
tract its owner’s attention. After listening a moment and grunting
into the instrument in a pleasant, respectful way, she hung up and
said to Dreyfus, “He’ll see you now.” Her painted eyebrows arched
knowingly, condescendingly.

P. R. Bigelow was eating a large jelly doughnut at his desk. He
mumbled his greeting with his mouth full, a glob of red goo in the
comer of his mouth.

Dreyfus took a chair and launched into his prepared remarks.
“I’ve asked for this time, sir, to ensure you know what is going on
with investigation. The answer is almost nothing. For
months now we’ve been spinning our wheels, begging computer
time to try and crack X’s letters to the Soviet ambassa-
dor, following a few people hither and yon all over Washington,
monitoring some phone lines, wasting an army of manpower and
bushels of money, and we are going essentially nowhere-I thought
you should know that.”

Bigelow wiped the jam from his lips with a napkin, sipped coffee
from a white mug labeled “World’s Best Dad” and took another
bite of doughnut.

His attitude rattled Dreyfus, who got out his pipe and rubbed
the bowl carefully. “Our best lead was a navy enlisted computer
technician in the Pentagon, a guy we thought was tapping the
computer for some of this stuff. Name of Terry Franklin. Yet Ca-
macho never let us pick the guy up. So we sat and watched him do
his little thing, and we were diligently following him, right on his
tail, in March when his car blew up with him in it.”

Bigelow finished the doughnut and used a moist finger to cap-
ture and convey the last few crumbs to his mouth. Then he dabbed
his Ups a final time and used two napkins to scrub the powdered
sugar and flecks of jelly from his oak desk. He put this trash in the
wastebasket and, sighing contentedly, rearranged his bottom in his
chair.

“And . . . ?” said P. R. Bigelow.

“A hit man wiped a walk-in witness to a drop with Franklin.
Camacho talked to her a couple times, but she got eliminated be-
fore we could get her to look at any photos. A professional hit.
Two twenty-two caliber slugs in the skull. We’ve got the autopsy
and lab reports and we’ve talked to neighbors up and down the
street. We’ve got nothing at all. We’re absolutely dry on this one.”

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” said Lloyd Dreyfus with an edge in his voice. He was
beginning to lose his temper and didn’t care if it showed a little.
“0ne of the staff officers in the navy’s ATA project—a Commander
Judy—is trying to peddle classified inside info to interested defense
contractors. We got interested in this officer when the project man-
ager was murdered over in West Virginia one Friday evening in
early February. That murder is unsolved—no one is doing any-
thing on it—and Camacho doesn’t appear to be doing any follow-
up on Judy’s contacts. He hasn’t even turned the file over to the
fraud investigators or NIS. We know some of the people Judy’s
talked to and . . .” Dreyfus threw up his hands in frustration.

“Finished yet?”

“Yes, I think that about covers it”

“So you asked for this appointment on the off chance that Ca-
macho has been lying to me about the activities of his office, pur-
posely bungling the search for this mole, wasting millions of dol-
lars and thousands of man-hours on wild-goose chases.” Dreyfus
opened his mouth to interrupt, but Bigelow held up a hand. “I
grant that you can probably phrase it more tactfully. You notice I
did not suggest that you came up here to tattle and gain some
personal advantage. You are a better man than that.” He sighed
heavily, almost a belch. “Of course there is another possibility.
Perhaps you just wanted to see if I was so stupid as to be satisfied
with the progress of the investigation to date.”

“I—” The upraised palm stopped him again.

“I am satisfied. Camacho has kept me fully informed of the
activities of his subordinates, of which you are one, by the way. His
lines of inquiry have been initiated with my knowledge and, where
necessary, my approval. He has discussed his concerns with me
and I have informed him of mine. He has followed orders to the
letter. I am completely satisfied with his performance. He is one of
the most talented senior officers in the bureau.”

Dreyfus just stared.

“Before you go back to work, do you wish for me to arrange a
meeting for you with the Director?” Bigelow managed to make his
face look interested and mildly amused at the same time. Yes,
Lloyd, you miserable, disloyal, alarmist peckerhead, you jumped
from the top of the cliff, but you seem to nave had the luck to
Strike a bush a few feet below the edge, which arrested your down-
ward progress. Do you wish my help in completing your suicidal
plunge?

Dreyfus shook his head no.

“I suggest that you not mention this little conversation to any of
your colleagues.”

“Yessir.”

“I don’t want to see you in this office ever again, Dreyfus, unless
you have your supervisor with you, or unless I send for you.”

“Yessir.”

“Let’s both get back to work.” P. R. Bigelow nodded toward the
closed office door and Dreyfus took the hint

By mid-May the dance of the dwarves at the Pentagon had reached
a critical frenzy. A thousand details were beginning to come to-
gether for a trip into the desert with the prototypes in June. The
airplanes had been moved weeks earlier to the Tonopah Test Range
in Nevada, the same secret field where the air force had tested its
stealth prototypes. Also known as Area 58, or Groom Lake, the
field lay about a hundred miles northwest of Las Vegas on a huge
government reservation with excellent physical security. Here the
contractors’ field teams readied the planes in separate hangars and
installed telemetry devices.

Toad and Rita would leave for Nevada two weeks before Jake
and the rest of the staff. They had intensive sessions planned with
company test pilots and engineers to learn everything they could
about the planes and how they flew. The Saturday night before
they left, Jake and Callie had them to dinner at the house in
Rehoboth Beach.

“How do you like being married?” Callie asked Rita in the
kitchen.

“I should have had a brother,” Rita confided. “Men are such
sloppy creatures. They don’t think like we do.”

On the screened-in porch, Jake and Toad sipped on bourbon and
Amy slurped a Coke. “So how’s married life, Toad?”

“Oh, so-so, I guess. Isn’t exactly like I thought it would be, but
nothing ever is. Ol’ Rita can think up stuff for me to do faster than
I can do it, and we only live in an apartment. If we had a town
house or something with a basement and a lawn, she’d have
worked me to death by now.”

Amy Carol thought this remark deliriously funny and giggled
hugely.

“Why don’t you go visit with Mom and Rita?”

She stood regally and tossed her hair. “I do believe I will join the
ladies, but she isn’t my mom. I wish you’d stop calling her that.”
She flounced off toward the kitchen.

“The day she”—Jake pointed after the departing youngster—
“gets married, I am going to get down on my knees and give
thanks.”

“That bad, huh?”

“She’s about driven Callie over the edge. That poor woman had
no idea what she was getting into. No matter how much love she
pours on Amy, the kid still does exactly as she chooses. She inten-
tionally disobeys and cuts up just to get her goat. And Callie never
gets mad, never pops off, never gives her anything but love. She’s
gonna go nuts.”

“Maybe she should get angry.”

“That’s what I think. And Callie insists she doesn’t want my
help or advice,”

‘They’re all alike,” Toad said, now vastly experienced.

Amy was back in five minutes, hopping from foot to foot, so
excited she bounced. “Can we fly the glider now, so I can show
Rita? She’s a pilot.”

Toad gasped. “She is?”

“You’re teasing me,” Amy said, stamping her foot.

“The wind’s wrong,” Jake pointed out “It isn’t coming in from
the sea. This evening if there’s a land breeze.”

“David said we might be able to fly the glider above the house in
a land breeze. He said the wind just goes right up and over our
house.”

“I never thought of that. Well, run down the street and see if he
can spend a half hour consulting with us.” As Amy scampered off,
Jake told Toad, “There’s an aviation expert right down the street
who is kind enough to offer advice from time to time.”

The aviation expert was apparently unoccupied at the moment
He showed up wearing a monster-truck T-shirt bearing the legend
“Eat Street.” His shoelaces were untied, his cowlicks fully aroused,
and his grin as impish as ever. He listened carefully to Jake’s plan.
“Sounds to me like it might work’ Cap’n,” he said with a sidelong
glance at Toad. “Might ding up your plane a little, though.”

“Ill risk it if you’ll fix the damage.”

“Callie! Rita!” Amy called excitedly. “Wre going to fly.”

Jake readied the plane for flight in the front yard under David’s
supervision. Eight rubber bands were stretched to hold the six-foot
wing to the fuselage. Batteries were tested and inserted, the cover
closed, switch on, controls waggled to the fall extent of their travel
using the radio control box: Amy checked each item after Jake
performed it while David briefed Toad on proper launch proce-
dure. In five minutes they were ready for the sky.

Toad climbed the ladder from the garage and scaled the sloping
roof until he sat perched on the ridgepole with the plane in hand.

“Pretty good breeze up here,” he informed the crowd below, which
now included Callie and Rita.

“Don’t you jump off there, Darius Green,” Rita called as Toad
sucked on a finger and held it aloft

“As you can plainly see, dear wife, I’m not wearing my wings
tonight,” Tarkington replied lightly. He flapped his elbows experi-
mentally. ” ‘I’ll astonish the nation and all creation, by flyin’ over
the celebration! I’ll dance on the chimneys, I’ll stand on the stee-
ple, I’ll flop up to winders and scare all the people,’ ” quoteth he,
striking a precarious pose, or trying to, up there on the ridge of the
roof with an airplane grasped carefully in his right hand.

“Maybe I’d better alert the emergency room at the hospital,”
Callie said, laughing.

“Oh, Callie,” Amy groaned. “He’s not going to jumpi Really!”

Toad finished his recitation with a flourish:” ‘And I’ll say to the
gawpin’ fools below, What world’s this here that I’ve come near?’ “

Jake Grafton handed the radio control box to David. “You’re up
first. Whenever you’re ready.”

The youngster centered the control levers and shouted to Toad.

“Let ‘er go!”

With the gentlest of tosses. Toad laid the glider into the rising air
currents. The boy immediately banked left and raised the nose
until the aircraft was barely moving in relation to the ground. As it
reached the end of the house, he reversed the controls and flew it
back the other way. The ship soared upward on the rising current
of air. It floated above Toad’s head, back and forth along the peak
of the roof, banking gently to maintain position and rising and
falling as the air currents dictated.

“All right!” Toad shouted and began to clap. On the ground the
spectators all did likewise.

“There’s just enough wind,” Jake told David, grinning broadly.

“Now. by God, that’s flying!”

“Awesome,” David agreed, his pixie grin spreading uncontrolla-
bly.

After a few minutes, David handed the control box to Jake. He
overbanked and the plane lost altitude precipitously, threatening to
strike Toad straddling the roof’s ridge. “Keep your nose up.”
David advised hurriedly. “You can fly slower than that.” As the
glider responded, he continued. “That’s it! She’s got plenty of cam-
ber in those wings and good washout. She’U fly real, real slow, just
riding those updrafts. That’s it! Let ‘er fly. Just sorta urge ‘er
along.”

He was right. The plane soared like a living thing, banking and
diving and climbing, seeking the rising air and responding will-
ingly. The evening sun flashed on the wings and fuselage and made
the little craft brightly lustrous against the darkening blue of the
sky above.

“Let Rita try it,” Amy urged.

“Don’t you want to?”

“No. Let Rita.”

“Come over here, Rita Moravia.” The pilot did as she was bid.
She watched the captain manipulate the controls as he explained
what each was. “The thing you gotta watch is that the controls
work backwards as you look at the plane head-on. Turn around
and fly it by looking over your shoulder. Then left will be left and
right will be right.”

Rita obediently faced away from the house and looked back over
her shoulder. Toad waved. Jake handed her the radio control box.
As David and Amy tried to offer simultaneous advice, Rita clum-
sily swung the plane back and forth and worked the nose hesi-
tantly. She overcontrolled as David groaned, “Not too much, no
no no.”

But the wind was dying. She got-the nose too high trying to
maintain altitude: the plane stalled and the nose fell through. The
plane shot forward away from the house, toward the street. David
scrambled, but Rita stalled it again and the left wing and nose dug
into the sandy lawn before the running boy could reach it The
rubber bands let loose and the wing popped free of the fuselage,
minimizing the damage.
“Nasty,” David declared.

“My dinner!” Callie exclaimed, and charged for the door.
“You did great for a first solo,” Amy assured Rita. The pilot
pulled the girl to her and gave her a mighty hug and a kiss on the
cheek. She got a big hug in return.

“She ain’t banged up too bad, Cap’n,” David called.

Up on the roof Toad was laughing. He blew Rita a kiss.

After dinner Callie shooed Jake and Toad off to the screened-in
porch while she cleaned up the dishes. Rita and Amy helped.

“So what did your parents think of Toad when they met him, or
have they yet?” Callie asked Rita.

“We went to visit them two weekends ago. Mother invited a few
of their closest friends over to meet the newlyweds. Then she cor-
nered Toad, and making sure I was in earshot, she asked him,
‘Now that you’re married, when is Rita going to give up flying?’”
Rita laughed ruefully, remembering. “How well do you know
Toad?” she asked Callie.

“Not very well. I met him for the first time last year in me
Mediterranean.”

“Well, he looked at Mother with that slightly baffled. Lord of the
Turnip Truck expression of his, and said, ‘Why would she do that?
Flying is what she does.’ I could have kissed him right there in
front of everyone.” Rita chuckled again.

“Doesn’t your mom want you to fly,” Amy piped, her chin rest-
ing on a hand, her eyes fixed on her new heroine.

“My mother is one of these new moderns who have elevated the
elimination of risk to a religious status. She serves only food certi-
fied safe for laboratory rats. She writes weekly letters to congress-
men urging a national fifty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit, helmets
for motorcyclists, gun control—she has never been on a motorcy-
cle in her life and to the best of my knowledge has never even seen
a real firearm. Her latest cause is a ban on mountain climbing since
she read an article about how many people per year fall off cliffs or
die of hypothermia. This from a woman who regards a walk across
a large parking lot as a survival trek.”

“I’m not afraid of things,” Amy assured Rita.

“It’s not fear that motivates Mother. She thinks of government
as Super-Mom, and who better to advise the politicians than the
superest mom of them all?”

“Flying is risky, inherently dangerous. I can understand your
mother’s concern,” Callie said as she rinsed a pot. “Flying is some-
thing I’ve had to live with. It’s a part of Jake and his life, a big
part. But I’ve had very mixed emotions about his being grounded.”
As she dried the pot she turned to Rita. “You or Toad may be
killed or crippled for life in an accident. After it happens, if it
happens, it won’t matter whose fault it is or how good you are in a
cockpit. I know. I’ve seen it too many times.”

“Life is risky,” Rita replied, “Life isn’t some bland puree with
all the caffeine and cholesterol removed. It doesn’t just go on for
ever and ever without end. amen. For every living thing there is a
beginning, a middle, and an end. And life is chance. Chance is the
means whereby God rules the universe.”

The flier thought a moment, then continued, choosing her words
carefully. “I have the courage to try to live with my fate, whatever
it may be.”

“Do you have enough?” Amy asked, dead serious.

“I don’t know,” said Rita. She smiled at the youngster. “I hope
so. I havent needed much courage so far. I’m healthy, reasonably
intelligent, and I’ve been lucky. But still, I gather courage where I
find it and save it for the storms to come.”

20

Through the years Jake Grafton
had become a connoisseur of air force bases. Visiting one was like
driving through Newport or Beverly Hills. With manicured lawns,
trimmed trees, well-kept substantial buildings and nifty painted
signs, air force bases made him fed like a poor farm boy visiting
the estate of a rich uncle. In contrast, the money the admirals
wheedled from a parsimonious Congress went into ships and air-
planes. The dedication of a new cinder-block enlisted quarters at
some cramped navy base in the industrial district of a major port
city was such a rare event that it would draw a half dozen admirals
and maybe the CNO.

The Tonopah facility, however, didn’t look like any air force
base Jake had ever seen. It looked like some shacky, jerry-built
temporary facility the navy had stuck out in the middle of nowhere
during World War II and had only now decided to improve. Per-
haps this base was just too new. Bulldozers and carthmovere sat
scattered around on large, open wounds of raw earth. No trees or
grass yet, though two trenchers appeared to be excavating for a
sprinkler system. When the wind blew, great clouds of dust embed-
ded with tumbleweeds swept across the flat, featureless desert and
through the stark frames of buildings under construction, and the
wind blew most of the time.