The Minotaur (35 page)

Security was as tight as Jake had ever seen it in the military. Air
policemen in natty uniforms with white dickeys at their throats
manned the gates and patrolled chain link fences topped with
barbed wire while they fought to keep their spifiy blue berets in
place against the wind. The fences were woven with metal strips to
form opaque barriers. Signs every few yards forbade stopping or
photography. You needed a pass to enter any area, and prominent
signs vibrating in the wind advised you of that fact

The place reeked with that peculiar aroma of government in-
trigue: Important, stupendous things are happening here. You don’t
want to know! We who do also know that you couldn’t handle it.
Trust us. In other words, the overall effect was precisely the same
gray ambience of don’t-bother-us superiority that oozes from large
post offices and the mausoleums that house the departments of
motor vehicles, social services, and similar enterprises throughout
the land.

Even the sergeant at the desk of the Visiting Officers’ Quarters
wanted to see Jake Grafton’s security documents. He made cryptic
notations in a battered green logbook and passed them back with-
out comment as he frowned at Helmut Fritsche’s facial hair. After
all, didn’t Lenin wear a beard?

As he escorted Jake and Fritsche down the hall toward their
rooms. Toad Tarkington said, ‘This place is really dead. Captain.
The nearest whorehouse is fifty miles-away.”

Fritsche groaned.

“Tonopah makes China Lake look like Paris after dark,” Tar-
kington told the physicist with relish. “This is as far as you can get
away from civilization without starting out the other side.” He
lowered his voice. “There’s spies everywhere. The place is crawling
with ‘em. Watch your mouth. Remember, loose lips sink—“

“Loose lips sink lieutenants,” Jake Grafton rumbled.

“Yessir, them too,” Toad chirped.

That evening Jake inspected the Consolidated Technologies air-
plane. Under the bright lights of the cavernous hangar, it was being
tended by a small army of engineers and technicians who were
busy checking every system, every wire, every screw and boh and
rivet Adele DeCrescentis watched a man fill in a checklist. Each
item was carefully marked when completed. Rita Moravia walked
back and forth around the aircraft, looking, probing, asking more
questions of the company test pilot who stood beside her. Toad
Tarkington was in the aft cockpit, going over the radar and coro-
puter one more time as a nearby yellow cart supplied electrical
power and cooling air.

At 9 P.M. they gathered in a large ready room on the second
deck of the hangar’s office pod. The room was devoid of furnish-
ings except for one portable blackboard and thirty or so folding
chairs.

The meeting lasted until midnight Every aspect of tomorrow’s
flight was gone over in detail Consolidated’s people approved the
test profile and agreed on the performance envelope Rita would
have to stay within on the first flight The route of the flight was
laid out on a large map which was posted on one wall and briefed
by Commander Les Richards. He pointed out the places where
ground cameras would be posted. Real-time telemetry from the
airplane would be supervised by Commander Dalton Harris.
Smoke Judy would fly the chase plane, an F-14 borrowed from
NAS Miramar, and a carefully briefed RIO would fihn the Consol-
idated prototype in flight from the F-14’s backseat

After the meeting broke up, Jake Grafton spent another thirty
minutes with his staff, then went down to the hangar deck. Only a
dozen or so technicians were still on the job.

The overhead floods made little gleaming pinpoints where they
reflected on the black surface of the Consolidated stealth plane. As
he walked, the tiny pinpoints moved along the complex curved
surfaces in an unpredictable way. With his face only a foot or so
from the skin of the plane, he studied it The dark material seemed
to have an infinite depth, or perhaps it was only his imagination.

The outer skin, he knew, was made of a composite that was
virtually transparent to radar waves. Underneath, carrying the
stresses, was a honeycomb radar-absorbent structure made of syn-
thetic material formed into small hexagonal chambers. The honey-
comb was bonded to inner skins of graphite and other strong com-
posites. He touched the airplane’s skin. Smooth and cool.

No wonder the Consolidated people were so proud of
their creation.

But how would it hold up aboard a ship? Could it stand the
rough handling and sea air and the poundings of cat shots and
traps? Thousands of them? Would it be easy to fly, within the
capabilities of the average pilot—not just a superbly trained, gifted
professional like Rita Moravia, but the average bright lad from
Moline or Miami with only three hundred hours of flight time who
would have to learn to use this Art Deco sculpture as a weapon?

Five nights. He needed a lot of answers in just a short time. Rita
and Toad would have to get them.

He walked away musing about Rita’s lack of test experience and
wondering if he had made a mistake giving her this ride.

Tomorrow. He would know then.

But the following day problems with the telemetry equipment kept
the prototype firmly on the ground. The engineers were still labor-
ing in the sun on a concrete mat where the temperature exceeded a
hundred and ten when Jake glanced at his watch and ordered the
plane towed back into the hangar. The Soviet satellite would soon
be overhead. The hangar’s interior was shady and cool. And since
the air force owned it, it was air-conditioned.

The next morning, Wednesday, the F-14 took off with a cracking
roar that seemed to split the desert apart. Smoke Judy pulled the
power off when he was safely airborne and made a dirty turn to the
downwind leg. He came drifting down toward the earth paralleling
the runway and stabilized at one hundred feet just as Rita began to
roll.

The prototype was noticeably quieter, so quiet that its noise was
barely audible above the howl of the Tomcafs engines as Smoke
used his throttles to hang the heavy fighter just above the runway
as the stealth bird accelerated. When Rita lifted off and retracted
her gear. Smoke added power to stay with her and the sound of the
stealth plane was entirely muflled.

“Damn quiet,” George Witeon remarked. “About like a Booing
767, maybe less.” The low noise level was a direct by-product of
burying the exhaust nozzles and tailpipes in the fuselage, shielded
from the underside, to reduce the plane’s infrared signature.

In the cockpit Rita concentrated on maintaining the selected test
profile and getting the feel of the controls. She had spent hours
sitting in the cockpit the last few weeks memorizing the position of
every switch, knob, and gauge, learning which buttons she needed
to press to place information where she wanted it on (he MFDa,
and so even now, minutes into her first flight in the plane, it was
familiar.

In the backseat Toad was busy with the system. He checked the
inertial; it seemed okay. With ring laser gyros, it had not a single
moving part and was more accurate than any conventional inertial
using electromechanical gyros. It would need to be. To keep the
stealth plane hidden, it would be necessary to fly with the radar off
most of the time, and the ring laser inertial would have to keep a
very accurate running tally of the plane’s position.

The computer was also functioning perfectly. He had encoded
the waypoint and checkpoint information onto optical-electronic—
optronic—cards on the ground and loaded them into the compufer
after engine start. The two-million-dollar pocket calculator, he
called it. It hummed right along, belching readouts of airspeed,
groundspeed, altitude, wind direction and velocity, true course,
magnetic course, drift angle, time to go to checkpoint, etc., over
fifteen readouts simultaneously. He had this information on the
right-hand MFD, roughly the location on the panel where it would
be in an A-6E.

Some of the displays were not yet hooked up since development
work was not yet complete. Consequently the three-dimensional
information presentations on the pilot’s holographic Heads-Up
Display could not be tested.

The phased-array radar in the nose received Toad’s attention
next. The antenna was flat and fixed, it did not rotate or move.
Actually it was made up of several hundred miniature antennas,
individually varying their pulse frequencies to steer or focus the
main beam. A conventional radar dish would have acted as a re-
flector to send the enemy’s radar signals back to him. Toad tuned
the radar to optimize the presentation and dictated his switch and
dial positions on the ICS, which, like the radar presentation, was
being recorded on tape for later study.

The next major pieces of gear he turned on and integrated into
the system were, for him, the most interesting. Two new infrared
search and tracking systems that were able to distinguish major
targets as far away as a hundred miles, depending upon the air-
craft’s altitude and the relative heat value of the target. One could
be used for searching for enemy fighters while the other was used
to navigate or locate a target on the ground. The range of these
sensors was a tenfold improvement over the relatively primitive IR
gear in the A-6E. Since a stealthy attack plane would fly most of its
mission with its radar off, these new gizmos would literally be the
eyes of the bombardier-navigator.

Toad took a second to glance to his left. Smoke had the F-14
about a hundred feet away in perfect formation. The backseater’s
helmet was hidden behind his camera, which was pointed this way.

That videotape would show every twitch of the flight control sur-
faces- Toad turned back to the task at hand.

He felt the plane yawing as Rita experimented with the controls
and advanced and retarded each throttle independently. She was
talking on the radio, telling Smoke what she was doing, reading the
engine performance data to the people on the ground so it could be
coordinated with the telemetry data, giving her impressions of the
feel of the plane.

”Seems responsive and sensitive in all axes,” she said. “Engine
response is good, automatic systems functioning as advertised,
a hundred feet a minute more climb than I expected. Fuel flow fifty
pounds per hour high. Oil pressure in the green, exhaust gas temps
are a hundred high. I like it. A nice plane.”

She leveled the plane at Plight Level 240 at .72 Mach, 420 knots
true. Toad checked the range and depression angles of the radar
and IR sensors, and ran checks on the inertial and computer.

Thirty minutes later, after hitting three navigation checkpoints,
Rita dropped the nose two degrees and began a power-on descent
back toward Tonopah. She leveled at 5,000 feet at 550 knots and
raced toward the field. Smoke Judy was a hundred feet away on the
right side, immobile in relation to the stealth bird.

In the backseat Toad ran an attack. His target was the hangar
that had housed the plane. The system gave Rita steering and time
and distance to go to a laser-guided bomb release. Everything func-
tioned as advertised. No weapon was released because the plane
carried none, but a tone sounded on the radio and was captured on
all the tapes, and it ceased abruptly at the weapons-release point,
interrupted by the electronic pulse to the empty bomb rack cun-
ningly faired into the airplane’s belly.

After three attacks at different altitudes, Rita slowed the plane
with speed brakes and dropped the gear and flaps. She entered the
landing pattern.

Two fleet Landing Signal Officers that Jake had borrowed from
Miramar—they had flown the F-14 to Tonopah—stood on the end
of the runway in a portable radio-equipped trailer that a truck had
delivered. They had spent the last three days painting the outline of
a carrier deck on the air force’s main runway and rigging a porta-
ble Optical Landing System—OLS—which the truck had also de-
livered. Now they watched Rita make simulated carrier ap-
proaches flying the ball, the “meatball,” on the OLS. Jake Grafton
stood beside them.

“Paddles has you,” the senior man told Rita as she passed the
ninety-degree position. One other LSO wrote while the first
watched the approach with the radiotelephone transceiver held to
his ear and dictated his comments.

“0n speed, little lined up left, little too much power . . .” The
plane swept past and its wheels whacked into the runway, right on
the line that marked the target touchdown point. The nose wheel
smacked down and the engines roared and Rita flew it off the
runway. The LSO shouted to his writer, ‘One pass.”

Jake Grafton stared at the plane in the pattern. It just looks
weird, he told himself The lifting fuselage and invisible intakes and
the canards and the black color, it didn’t look like a real airplane.
Then he knew. It looked like a model It looked like one of those
plastic planes he had glued together and held at arm’s length and
marveled at.

“You’re carrying too much power in the groove,” the LSO told
Rita after the second pass.

“I’m just floating down with the power way back,” she replied.
“And we’re hearing a little rumble. Maybe incipient compressor
stall. I’ll use the boards next time around.”

The Consolidated engineers had thought the speed brakes would
be unnecessary in the pattern. Yet with the intakes on top of the
plane, behind the cockpit, maybe the air reaching them was too
turbulent when the plane was all cocked up in the landing configu-
ration. Jake Grafton began to chew on his lower lip. The air force
doesn’t land planes like this, he reminded himself. They wouldn’t
have tried these maneuvers when they flew the plane.

With the boards out the plane approached at a slightly higher
nose attitude, its engine noise louder. The speed brakes allowed—
required—Rita to come in with a higher power setting. “This feels
better,” she commented. “But I’m still hearing that rumble. Little
more pronounced now, if anything,”