The Minotaur by Stephen Coonts Read Free Book Online Page B

individual combat in the skies. The fighter crowd said the
attack pukes were phlegmatic plodders with brass balls—and no
imaginations—who dropped bombs because they didn’t know any
better. Most of it was good, clean fun, but with a tinge of truth.
    When Jake finished going through the records he stacked them
carefully and stared thoughtfully at the pile. Dunedin and Strong
had assembled a good group, he concluded, officers with excellent
though varied backgrounds, from all over tactical naval aviation-
The test pilot was the only real question mark. Moravia certainly
had her tickets punched and was probably smarter than Einstein,
but she had no actual experience in flight-testing new designs. He
would ask Dunedin about her.
    Tomorrow he would meet them. That was soon enough. First he
had to find out what was really happening from Henry or Dunedin.
    Henry spoke of minefields—a grotesque understatement. The
problems inherent in overcoming the inertia of the bureaucracy to
produce a new state-of-the-art weapons system were nothing short
of mind-boggling. Dunedin must feel like he’s been ordered to
build the Great Pyramid armed with nothing but a used condom
and a flyswatter. And for God’s sake, do it quietly, top secret and
all. Aye aye, sir.
    In the Crystal City underground mall he found a toy store and
purchased a plastic model of the air force’s new stealth fighter, the
F-117. He also bought a tube of glue. Then he boarded the Metro
blue train for the ride to Rosslyn.
    When the subway surfaced near the Key Bridge, Jake stared
gloomily at the raindrops smearing the dirt on the windows as the
train rocked along under a dark gray sky, then it raced noisily back
into another hole in the ground and like his fellow passengers, he
refocused his eyes vacantly on nothing as he instinctively created
his own little private space.
    He felt relieved when the doors finally opened and he joined the
other passengers surging across the platform, through the turn-
stiles, then onto the world’s longest escalator. The moving stair
ascended slowly up the gloomy, slanting shaft bearing its veterans
of purgatory. Amid the jostling, pushing, hustling throng, he was
carried along as part of the flow. This morning he had been a
tourist. Now he was as much a part of this human river as any of
them. Morning and evening he would be an anonymous face in the
mob: hurry along, hurry, push and shove gently, persistently, insis-
tently, demanding equal vigor and speed from every set of legs,
equal privacy from every set of blank, unfocused eyes. Hurry,
hurry along.
    Rain was still falling when he reached the sidewalk. He paused
and turned his collar up against the damp and chill, then set off for
the giant condo complex four blocks away.
    Most of the people scurrying past him on the sidewalk had done
this every working day for years. They were moles, he told himself
glumly, blind creatures of the dark, damp places where the sun and
wind never reached, unaware that the universe held anything but
the dismal corridors where they lived out their pathetic lives. And
now he was one of them.
    He stopped at the corner, the model in the box under his arm.
People swirled around him, their heads down, their eyes on the
concrete. Callie wouldn’t get home to the flat for another hour.
    He turned and walked back against the flow of the crowd toward
the station exit. Right across the street from the exit was a Roy
Rogers. He paid for a cup of coffee and found a seat near the
atrium window where he could watch the gray people bent against
the wind and the raindrops sliding down the glass.
    The euphoria he had felt when he talked to Vice Admiral Henry
this morning was completely gone. Now he had a job … a pa-
perwork job, going to endless meetings and listening to reports and
writing recommendations and trying to keep from going crazy. A
job in the bureaucracy. A staff job, the one he had fought against,
refused to take, pulled every string to avoid, all