The Minotaur (6 page)

She poured a cup of coffee and blew across it gently, then took
an experimental sip. She stood looking at him over the rim of the
cup. “Where will you be working?”

“It’s a little shop, some cubbyhole that belongs to NAVAIR. I’ll
be working on the new Advanced Tactical Aircraft.”

“Oh, Jake.” She took the seat beside him. “That’s terrific.” For
the first time in months, her voice carried genuine enthusiasm.

“That’s about all I can tell you. The project is classified up the
wazoo. But it’s a real job and it needs doing, which is a lot more
than you can say for a lot of the jobs they have over there.”

He shouldn’t have added that last phrase. The muscles around
her eyes tightened as she caught the edge in his voice. “After all
you’ve done for the navy, they owed you a good job.”

“Hey, Callie, it doesn’t work like that. You get paid twice a
mouth and that’s all they owe you. But this is a navy job and Lord
knows how it’ll all turn out.” Perhaps he could repair the damage.
“I’d rather have a navy job than be president of a bank. You know
me, Callie.”

Her lips twisted into a lopsided smile. “Yes, I guess I do.” She
put her cup on the coffee table and stood.

Uh-oh! Here we go again! Jake took out his shirttail and used it
to clean bis glasses as she walked into the kitchen. You’d better be
cool now, he decided. Help her along. He called out, “What say we
go get some dinner? I’m hungry. How about you?”

4

The ringing of the telephone
woke Jake Grafton. As he groped for the receiver on the stand by
the bed he blinked mightily to make out the luminous hands of the
alarm dock: 5 A.M. “Grafton.”

“Good morning. Captain. Admiral Henry. I wanted to catch
you before you got started this morning.”

“You did, sir.”

“How about meeting roe on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
about oh-seven-hundred in civilian clothes.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

“Thanks.” The connection broke.

“Who was that?” Callie asked as Jake cradled the phone and
closed his eyes. The alarm wouldn’t ring for half an hour.

“0ne of my many bosses.”

“Oh,” she mattered. In less than a minute he heard her breath-
ing deepen with sleep. He wondered what Tyler Henry wanted to
talk about that couldn’t be said at the office. After five minutes he
gave up trying to sleep and got out of bed. He tiptoed for the
bathroom.

By the time the alarm went off he had showered and shaved and
dressed. He had picked out dark gray slacks and a long-sleeved
3W shirt. Over this he had added a tie, an old sweater and a
blazer.

38

“Good morning,” he said as he pushed the lever in on the back
of the clock to silence it.

“Come hug me.” She smelled of warm woman and sleep. “It’s so
nice having you here to give me my morning hug.” She pushed him
back so she could see his face.

“I love you, woman.” He cradled her head in his hands. “You’re
going to have to quit trying to analyze it and just accept it. It’s
true.”

“Hmmm.” She flashed a smile and became all business as she
moved away from him and got up. “Why the civilian clothes?”

“I’m playing hooky with the boss.”

“And it’s only your second day on the job. Lucky you,” she said
as she headed for the bathroom. With the door closed she called,
“How about turning on the coffeepot and toasting some English
muffins?”

“Yeah.” He headed toward the kitchen, snapping on the lights as
he went. “You’re a real lover, ace. One look at your sincere puss
and they tighten up like an IRS agent offered a ten-dollar bribe.”

Vice Admiral Henry was sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memo-
rial when the taxi deposited Jake in front. He came down the steps
as Jake approached and joined him on the wide sidewalk. “Morn-
ing, sir.”

The admiral flashed a smile and strolled to the curb. As he
reached it a gray Ford Fairmont sedan sporting navy numbers on
the door pulled to a stop. Henry jerked open the rear door without
fanfare and maneuvered his six-foot-three-inch frame in. Jake fol-
lowed him. When the door closed the sailor at the wheel got the
car in motion.

“Why the cloak and dagger?”

“I don’t know who all the players are,” the admiral said without
humor.

Jake watched the occasional pedestrians braving the blustery
wind under a raw sky until he became aware that the admiral’s
attention was on the vehicles on the street behind them. Jake
glanced over his shoulder once or twice, then decided to leave the
spy stuff to Henry. He watched the sailor handle the car. The man
was good. No wasted motion. The car glided gently through the
traffic, changing lanes at the last moment and gliding around cor-
ners without the application of the brake, all quite effortlessly. It
was a show and Jake watched it in silence.

“Could have picked you up at your place,” Henry muttered,
“but I wanted to visit the Wall.” The Wall was the Vietnam Memo-
rial, Just across the street from the Lincoln Memorial. “It’s been
too long and I never seem to have any time.”

“I understand.”

“Turn left here,” Henry said to the driver, who complied. The
car headed east on Independence Avenue. Henry ordered another
left turn on Fourteenth Street and directed the driver to go by the
Jefferson Memorial. “I think we’re clean,” he muttered to Jake
after yet another careful look through the rear window. At the
Jefferson Memorial, Henry asked the driver to pun over. “Come
back for us at nine.”

He led Jake toward the walkway around the Tidal Basin. Across
the basin the Washington Monument rose toward the low clouds.
Beyond it, Jake knew, but not visible from here, was the White
House.

Jake broke the silence first. “Does Admiral Dunedin know we’re
having this talk this morning, sir?”

“Yeah. I told him. You work for him. But I wanted to brief you
personally. What do you know about stealth?”

“The usual,” Jake said, snuggling into his coat against the chill
wind. “What’s in the papers. Not much.”

“The air force contracted for two prototype stealth fighters un-
der a blanket of absolute secrecy. Lockheed got the production
contract They call the thing the F-117A. It’s a fighter in name
only; it’s really an attack plane—performance roughly equivalent
to the A-7 without afterburner but carries less than half the A-7
weapons load. Primary weapons are Maverick missiles. It’s a little
ridiculous to call a subsonic minibomber a fighter, but if they can
keep the performance figures low-key they might get away with it.”

“I thought that thing was supposed to be a warp-three killing
machine.”

“Yeah. I suspect the congressmen who agreed to vote for a huge
multibillion-buck project with no public debate probably did too.
But even supersonic ain’t possible. The thing doesn’t even have
afterburners. Might go supersonic in a dive—I don’t know. Any-
way, the air force got more bang for their buck with the stealth
bomber, the B-2, which Northrop is building. It’s also subsonic, a
flying wing, but big and capable with a good fuel load. The only
problem is the B-2s cost $516 million a pop, so unless you’re send-
ing them to Moscow to save the human race, you can’t justify
risking them on anything else. A B-2 isn’t a battlefield weapon.”

“How are these gizmos going to find their targets?” Conven-
tional bombers used radar to navigate and locate their targets, but
the transmission of a radar beam from a stealth bomber would
reveal its location, thereby negating all the expensive technology
used to hide it.

Admiral Henry settled onto a park bench with his back to the
Tidal Basin. His eyes roamed the sidewalks, which were deserted
on this early-spring morning- “You’re not going to believe this, but
the air force hasn’t solved that problem yet. They’re waiting for
technology that’s under development.”

Jake Grafton looked at Henry to see if he was serious. He ap-
peared to be. “How about a satellite rig like the A-6G was going to
have? The Navstar Global Positioning System?”

“That’s part of the plan, but the trouble with satellites is that
you can’t count on them to last longer than forty-eight hours into a
major East-West confrontation. And there’s only eight satellites
aloft—the system needs twenty-eight. If they ever get all the birds
aloft it should tell you your position to wnhin sixteen meters any-
where on earth, but that’s a big if what with NASA’s shuttle and
budget problems. No, I think the answer is going to be a system
made up of a solid-state, ring-laser gyro inertial nav system, passive
infrared sensors and a stealthy radar, one that powers up only
enough to see what’s necessary, has automatic frequency agility,
that sort of thing. That’s basically the A-6G and B-2 system. We’ll
use it on the A-12. It’s still under development.”

Henry snorted and wiggled his buttocks to get comfortable.
“Congress isn’t going to fund any significant B-2 buy. The way the
whole budget process screwed up the buy, with inflation and pre-
dictable overruns and underbuys, the last plane in the program is
going to cost over a billion bucks. The manned strategic bomber is
going the way of the giant panda and the California condor. We
want to avoid the mistakes the air force made,”

“SAC will have more generals than airplanes.”

“The stealth concept has been around since World War II,”
Henry continued, “more as a curio than anything else. It really
became a driving force in aircraft design after Vietnam when it
became apparent that conventional aircraft were going to have a
very rough time surviving in the dense electronic environment over
a Western European battlefield. Conventional electronic warfare
can only do so much. The spooks say there’ll be too many frequen-
cies and too many sensors. That’s the conventional wisdom, so it’s
probably wrong.” He shrugged- “But any way you cut it, the attri-
tion rate over that battlefield would be high, which favors the Sovi-
ets. They have lots of planes and we can’t match them in quantity.
So we would lose. Ergo, stealth.”

“But we could match them in quantity,” Jake said. “At least the
air force could build a lot of cheap airplanes optimized for one
mission, like fighter or attack. No room on carriers for that kind of
plane, of course.”

“The air force doesn’t want that. Their institutional ethic is for
more complex, advanced aircraft with greater and greater capabil-
ity. That’s the whole irony of the stealth fighter. They’ve billed this
technology as a big advance but in reality they got a brand-new
tactical bomber with 1950s performance. But, they argue, it’s
survivable- Now. For the immediate future. Until and only until
the Russians come up with a way to find these planes—or someone
else figures out a way and the Russians steal it. Even so, the only
thing that made first-generation stealth technology feasible was
smart weapons, assuming the crew can find the target. These
planes have little or no capability with air-to-mud dumb bombs.”
Henry stared at his toes and wriggled them experimentally. “Can
you imagine risking a five-hundred-million buck airplane to dump
a load of thousand-pounders on a bridge?”

“Does stealth ensure survivability?” Jake prompted, too inter-
ested to notice his continuing discomfort from the breeze off the
river.

“Well, it all boils down to whether or not you think fixed air
bases are survivable in the war the air force is building their planes
to fight, and that is a war in Europe against the Soviets which has
escalated to a nuclear exchange. If I were a Russian I wouldn’t
worry much about these airplanes—neither of which has any off-
concrete capability—I’d just knock out their bases at the beginning
of hostilities and forget about them.”

“What about a conventional war with the Soviets?”

“If anyone has figured out a way to keep it from going nuclear, I
haven’t heard about it.”

“How many Maverick missiles are there? A couple thousand?”

“Twice that.”

“That’s still no more than a week or two’s supply. It’d better be
a damn short war.”

The admiral grunted. “The basic dilemma: without stealth tech-
nology the air force says planes can’t survive over a modern battle-
field; with stealth they must use only sophisticated weapons that
are too expensive to buy in quantity- And they’re not as reliable as
cheap weapons. And if the airplanes truly are a threat, the Soviets
have a tremendous stimulus to escalate the war to a nuclear strike
to eliminate their bases.” He chopped the air with the cutting edge
of his hand. ‘This stuff is grotesquely expensive.”

“Sounds like we’ve priced ourselves out of the war business.”

“I fucking wish! But enough philosophy. Stealth technology cer-
tainly deserves a lot of thought. It’s basically just techniques to
lower an aircraft’s electromagnetic signature in the military wave-
lengths: radio—which is radar—and heat—infrared. And they’re
trying to minimize the distance the plane can be detected by ear
and by eye. Minimizring the RCS—the Radar Cross Section—and
the heat signature are the two most important factors and end up
driving the design process. But it’s tough. For example, to half the
radar detection range you must lower the RCS by a factor of six-
teen—the fourth root. To lower the IR signature in any meaningful
manner you must give up afterburners for your engines and bury
the engines inside the airplane to cool the exhaust gases, the sum
total of which is less thrust. Consequently we are led kicking and
screaming into the world of design compromises, which is a handy
catchall for mission compromises, performance and range and
payload compromises, bang-and-buck compromises. That’s where
you come in.”

Admiral Henry rose from the bench and sauntered along the
walk discussing the various methods and techniques that lowered,
little by little, the radar and heat signatures of an aircraft. He
talked about wing and fuselage shape, special materials, paint, en-
gine and inlet duct design and placement, every aspect of aircraft
construction. Stealth, he said, involved them all. Finally he fell
silent and walked along with his shoulders rounded, his hands
thrust deep into his pockets.