The Minotaur (11 page)

He’s quieter, more subdued, as if he’s someplace else … or
thinking of something he can’t share.

“Do you think he has forgotten?”

The words startled her. She had been musing aloud.

“I don’t know. He says he can’t remember much about it, and
that’s probably true. But he stops there and doesn’t say what he
does remember.”

Arnold nodded. For three months in this office Jake had said
nothing of the flight that led to his injury. “What of his decision to
die?”

Callie stared at the psychologist. “You think he made that deci-
sion?”

“You know he did.” Arnold’s eyes held her. “He decided to ram
the transport. The odds of surviving such a collision were very
small. Jake knew that. He’s a professional military aviator; he had
to know the probably outcome of a ramming” The doctor’s shoul-
ders moved ever so slightly. “He was willing to die to kill his
enemies.”

After a moment Callie nodded.

“You must come to grips with that. It was a profound moment in
his life, one he apparently doesn’t wish to dwell on or try to re-
member. The complex human being that he is, that’s how he
chooses to live with it. Now you must come to grips with his
decision and you must learn to live with it.”

“Don’t many men in combat come to that moment?”

“I think not.” Benny tugged at his beard. “The literature—it’s
hard to say. Most men—I suspect—most men facing a situation
that may cause their death who do go forward probably do so
without thought. The situation draws them onward, the situation
and their training and their own private concept of manhood. But
in that cockpit—Jake evaluated the danger and saw no other alter-
native and decided to go forward. Willingly. To accept the inevita-
ble consequences, one of which would be his death.” He continued
to worry the strands of hair on his chin.

“There’s a verse in the Bible,” Callie said, her chin quivering.
” “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life
for his friends.’”

“Ahal If only you believed that!”

“I do,” she said, trying to convince herself, and turned back to
the window. Other husbands went off to work every morning, they
had regular jobs, they came home nights and weekends and life
was safe and sane. Of course, people die in car wrecks and you read
about airliner crashes. But those things don’t happen to people like
me!

Why couldn’t Jake have found a safe, sane, regular job, with an
office and a company car and a nice, predictable future? Damn
him, she had waited all these years for the sword to drop. Those
memorial services whenever someone was killed—she always went
with Jake to those. The widow, the kids, the condolences, the or-
gan music. But it wouldn’t happen to Jake—oh no! He’s a good
pilot, real good, the other men say, too good to ever smear himself
all over some farmer’s potato field, too good to ever leave her sitting
alone in the chapel with the organ wheezing and some fat preacher
spouting platitudes and everyone filing past and muttering well-
meaning nonsense. Damn you, Jake. Damn you!

Arnold passed her a Kleenex and she used it on her eyes. He
held out the box and she took several and blew her nose.

“Next week, perhaps we can talk about that little girl you want
to adopt?”

Calhe nodded and tried to arrange her face.

“Thank you for coming today.” He smiled gravely. She rose and
he held the door for her, then eased it shut as she paused at the
receptionist’s desk to write a check.

He opened her file and made some notes. After a glance at his
watch, he picked up his phone and dialed. On the third ring a man
answered. One word: “Yes.”

“She was here today,” Arnold said without preliminaries. “He’s
going to be working on a new airplane project, she says.” He con-
tinued, reading from his notes.

It wasn’t until the A-6 was taxiing toward the duty runway for
takeoff that the incongruity of the whole situation struck Toad
Tarkington. The plane thumped and wheezed and swayed like a
drunken dowager as it rolled over the expansion joints in the con-
crete. He had been so busy with the computer and Inertial Naviga-
tion System while they sat in the chocks that he had had no time to
look around and become accustomed to this new cockpit. Now as
he took it all in a wry grin twisted his Ups under his oxygen mask.

Rita Moravia sat in the pilot’s seat on his left in the side-by-side
cockpit. Her seat was slightly higher than his and several inches
further forward, but due to her size her head was on the same level
as his. Not an inch of her skin was exposed. Her helmet, green
visor and oxygen mask encased her head, and her body and arms
were sheathed in a green flight suit, gloves, steel-toed black boots.
Over all this she wore a G suit, torso harness and survival vest, to
which was attached an inflatable life vest. Toad wore exactly the
same outfit, but the thought that the beautiful Rita Moravia was
hidden somewhere under the flight gear in the pilot’s seat struck
him as amusing. One would never even know she was a woman
except for the sound of her voice on the intercom system, the ICS.
“Takeoff checklist,” she said crisply, her voice all business.

Toad read the items one by one and she gave the response to
each after checking the appropriate switch or lever or gauge as the
plane rolled along. The taxiway seemed like a little highway going
nowhere in particular; the concrete runways on the right were
hidden by the grassy swell of a low hill. To the left was a gravel
road, and paralleling that the beach, where die Puget Sound waves
lapped at the land. The water in the sound appeared glassy today.
Above them was blue sky, a pleasant change from the clouds that
had moved restlessly from west to east since Toad and Rita arrived
on the island. Even Mother Nature was cooperating. The back-
ground noise of the two idling engines, a not unpleasant drone,
murmured of latent power. They promised flight Toad breathed
deeply and exhaled slowly. He had been on the ground too long.

Clearance copied and read back, Toad asked the tower for clear-
ance to take off. It was readily granted. The traffic pattern was
momentarily empty. Rita Moravia rolled the A-6 onto the runway
and braked to a stop. With her left hand she advanced the throttles
to the stops as Toad flipped the IFF to transmit. The IFF encoded
the plane’s radar blip on all air control radars.

The engines wound up slowly at first, then quickened to a full-
throated roar that was loud even in the cockpit The nose of the
machine dipped as the thrust compressed the nose-gear oleo, al-
most as if the plane were crouching, gathering strength for its leap
into die sky. Moravia waggled the stick gently, testing the controls
one more time, while she waited for the engine temperatures to
peak. Outside the plane. Toad knew, the roar of the two engines
could be heard for several miles. No doubt the flight crewmen on
the ramps near the hangars were pausing, listening as the roar
reached them, their attention momentarily captured by the bird
announcing its readiness for flight. Finally satisfied, Rita Moravia
released the brakes.

The nose oleo rebounded and the A-6 began to roll, gathering
speed, faster and faster and faster. The needle on the airspeed indi-
cator came off the peg … 80 … 100 . . . faster and faster as
the wheels thumped and the machine swayed gently over the un-
even concrete . . . 130 . . . 140 . . . the nose came off the
ground and Moravia stopped the stick’s rearward movement with
a gentle nudge.

As the broad, swept wings bit into the air the main wheels left
the ground and the thumps and bumps ceased.

Moravia slapped the gear handle up and, passing 170 knots.
raised the flaps and slats. Climbing and accelerating, the Intruder
shot over the little town of Oak Harbor bellowing its song. Upward
they flew, upward, into the smooth gentle sky.

He was flying again. It seemed—somehow it was strange and bit-
tersweet all at once. He hadn’t thought about his last flight in
months, but now as the engines moaned and the plane swam
through the air, memories of his last flight with Jake Grafton in an
F-14 over the Med flooded over Toad Tarkington. There was fear
in those memories. He fought to push them out of his mind as he
twiddled the knobs to optimize the radar presentation and checked
the computer readouts. He glanced outside. The peaks of the Cas-
cade Mountains were sliding by beneath the plane. The steep crags
were gray in those places where the clouds and snow didn’t hide
their naked slopes.

Rita Moravia had the Intruder level at Flight Level 230—23,000
feet Toad concentrated on the equipment on the panel in front of
him. As he tried desperately to remember all that his instructor
had told him, he sneaked a glance at Moravia. She sat in her seat
calmly scanning the sky and the instrument panel. She had en-
gaged the autopilot and was watching it fly the plane. Now she
adjusted the bug on the HSI, the rotating compass ring. She had
the Yakima TACAN dialed in. Now she toggled the switch that
moved her seat up a millimeter and stretched lazily. “Nice plane,
huh?” she said when her left hand once more came to rest on the
throttles, where her ICS button was.

Toad fumbled with his ICS button, which he keyed with his left
foot. “Yeah. Fucking super.”

“How’s the system?”

“Looks okay to me, as if I knew.”

“Found Yakima yet?”

He ignored the question as he studied the radar. The city was
still seventy miles away according to tne TACAN. There it was on
the radar, right under the cursor cross hairs, just a blob of solid
return amid a whole scopeful of return from hills and ridges and
houses and barns.

Yeah, Toad, you better figure out how to find a city in all this
mess or this little flight is gonna be a disaster. The whole essence of
the bombardier’s art was interpreting this jumble of return on the
radar scope. And Jake Grafton and those other A-6 perverts de-
manded he pick it up in just a week! Well, he’d show them! If those
attack weenies can figure out this shit in eight months, a week will
be about right for the old Horny Toad. After all, this worn-out
flying dump truck…

Moravia was asking Seattle Center if they could proceed direct
to the start of the low-level route. Toad cycled the steering to that
point and examined the radar carefully. Thank God the guys at
VA-128 had picked a town on the Columbia River to start the
route. Even a blind fighter RIO—Radar Intercept Officer—could
find that. Or should be able to find it with the aid of the radarscope
photographs that were included in the navigation package for this
route. He arranged the stack of photographs on his kneeboard and
compared the first one to the live presentation on the radar scope.
Yep!

They had passed the third checkpoint on the navigation route
and were somewhere in central Oregon flying at 360 knots true,
335 indicated, 500 feet above the ground, when Toad’s savage
mood began to improve. He was identifying the checkpoints with-
out difficulty, no doubt because they were ridiculously prominent
features in the landscape ahead, but he was finding them. The
system seemed to be working as advertised and the INS was tight,
tight as a virgin’s . . .

For the first time he became aware of Moravia’s smooth, confi-
dent touch on the controls. She flew the plane with a skill that
belied her inexperience. Toad watched her handle the plane. The
stick barely moved as the plane rose and fell to follow the ground
contour and her thumb flicked the trim button automatically. She
was good. The airspeed needle seemed glued to the 335-knot tic on
the dial “You’re a pretty good pilot,” he said on the ICS.

“Just navigate,” she replied, not even glancing at him.

Another casual slap in the chops. Goddamn women! He placed
his face against the black hood that shielded the radar scope and
studiously ignored her.

The plane approached the Columbia River again from the south
down a long, jagged canyon that ran almost straight north out of
central Oregon. Stealing glances from the radar, out the right side
of the airplane Toad saw a harsh, arid landscape of cliffs and stone
pillars, spectacular monuments to the power of wind and water
and the vastness of time. The almost vertical rock surfaces pro-
duced crisp, sharp images on the radar screen. He examined the
infrared display. The infrared images were from a sensor mounted
on a turret on the bottom of the aircraft’s nose, immediately in
front of the nose-gear door. The sides of the rock toward the sun
looked almost white on the IR scope, which was mounted above
the radar scope and was also shielded from extraneous light by the
black flexible hood projecting from the instrument paneL

The navigation checkpoint to enter the navy’s target range at
Boardman, Oregon, was a grain silo and barn on top of a cliff near
the lower reaches of this canyon. The cursors—cross hairs posi-
tioned by the computer on the radar screen—rested near a promi-
nent blip. Toad turned up the magnification on the infrared as he
moved the cursors to the blip. Yep. That was the barn all right-
Over the barn he cycled the steering to the initial point for the
run-in to the target and called the range on radio.
“November Julie 832, you’re cleared in.”

Rita let the plane drift up to 1,500 feet above the ground. They
had left the cliffs and canyons behind them and flew now over
almost flat, gently rolling terrain that was used for dry-land farm-
ing. Following a printed checklist on his kneeboard, Toad set the
switches in the cockpit for bombing. Six blue twenty-five-pound
Mark 76 practice bombs hung on a rack under the right wing,
Station Four. Each of these little bombs contained a smoke charge
that would mark the spot of impact. The A-6 crossed the initial
point, the IP, and Rita swung it toward the target ten miles east

The target lay on the south side of the Columbia River in fiat,
dry, treeless country. The run-in line was marked by a dirt road on
the ground, but neither Toad nor Rita paid any attention. During
the minute and forty seconds it took the Intruder to traverse the
ten miles from the IP to the target. Toad was absorbed in getting
the cursors precisely on the radar reflector that marked the target
bull’s-eye, checking the computer and inertial readouts, using the
infrared for visual ID, locking up the target with the laser ranger-
designator, then checking the information the computer received
to make sure it was valid. Finally he put the system into attack.