The Minotaur by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online

adventure in the Med last year. Cap-
tain. It’s been pretty dull without El Hakim to kick around,”
Knight grinned easily. He had an air of quiet confidence that Jake
found reassuring. Like all career officers getting acquainted,
Knight and Jake told each other in broad terms of their past tours.
Knight had spent most of his operational career in A-6 outfits, and
bad been ordered to this billet after a tour as commanding officer
of an A-6 squadron.
    “I came by to find out everything you know about the A-12,”
Jake said lightly.
    Knight chuckled. “A real kidder, you are. I’ve been soaking up
info for a year and a half and I haven’t even scratched the surface,
And you see I’m only one guy. The A-6 coordinator sits here
beside me. and on the other side of the room we have the F-14 and
F/A-18 guys. One for each airplane. We don’t have a secretary or a
yeoman. We do our own mail. We make our own coffee. I spend
about a third of my time in this office, which is where I do the
unclass stuff and confidential. Another third of my time is spent
upstairs in the vault working on classified stuff. I have a desk up
there with another computer and safes. The rest of my time is
spent over at NAVAIR, in your shop, trying to see what you guys
are up to.”
    “Just one guy.” Jake was disappointed, and it showed. He felt a
little like the kid who met Santa for the first time and found he was
old and fat and smelled of reindeer shit. “One guy! Just exactly
what is your job?”
    “I’m the man with the money. I get it from Rear Admiral Cos-
tello. He’s the Aviation Plans and Programs honcho. He tells me
what we want the plane to do. We draw up the requirements. You
build the plane we say we want, you sell it to me, and I write the
checks. That’s it in a nutshell.”
    “Sounds simple enough.”
    “Simple as brain surgery. There’s an auditor that comes around
from time to time, and he’s going to cuff me and take me away one
of these days. I can see it in his eyes.”
    They talked for an hour, or rather Knight talked and Jake lis-
tened, with his hands on his thighs. Knight had a habit of tapping
aimlessly on the computer terminal on his desk, striking keys at
random. When Jake wasn’t looking at Knight he was looking at
the Sports Illustrated swimsuit girl over Knight’s desk (April 1988
was a very good month), or the three airplane pictures, or the
Farrah Fawcett pinup over the A-6 guru’s desk. Between the two
desks sat a flung cabinet with combination locks on every drawer-
Similar cabinets filled the room. Twice Knight rooted through an
open cabinet drawer and handed Jake classified memos to read, but
not to keep. Each was replaced in its proper file as soon as Jake
handed it back.
    Then Knight took Jake up a floor to the vault, where he signed a
special form acknowledging the security regulations associated
with black programs. In this chamber, surrounded by safes and
locks and steel doors. Commander Knight briefed him on the tech-
nical details of the prototypes, the program schedules and so on.
    At three o’clock Jake was back on the twelfth floor of the Crys-
tal City complex to meet with Vice Admiral Dunedin. His office
was not quite as plush as Henry’s but it was every bit as large. Out
the large windows airliners were landing and taking off from Na-
tional airport.
    “Do you have any idea what you’re getting into?” Dunedin
asked. He was soft-spoken, with short gray hair and workman’s
hands, thick, strong fingers that even now showed traces of oil and
grease. Jake remembered hearing that his hobby was restoring old
cars.
    “In a vague, hazy way.”
    “Normally we assign Aeronautical Engineering Duty Officers,
AEDOs, to be program managers. By definition, an AEDO’s spe-
cialty is the procurement business. Harold Strong was an AEDO.
But, considering the status of the A-12, we figured that we needed
a war fighter with credibility on the Hill.” The Hill, Jake knew,
was Capitol Hill, Congress.