fly fighters.” He paused, apparently considering the implications of this bold state- ment. “What’s it really like?” he asked, not quite so confident- Jake was still trying to explain when they rounded the comer and he saw the strange car in the driveway. When he saw the blue Department of Defense bumper sticker with the three stars on it, he knew. Vice Admiral Henry. He led the boy inside.
The admiral was wearing jeans and a heavy jacket today. He and another man in a coat sat at the dining room table with Callie drinking coffee, David marched over to her and held the wing so she could see it. “He let the nose fall in a turn and crashed. We can fix it, though.”
“Good morning, Admiral.”
“Jake, I’d like you to meet Luis Camacho.”
“Hi.” Jake leaned across the table-and shook hands. Camacho was in his early fifties with no tan, a man who spent his life in- doors. Even though he wore a jacket his spare tire was evident, but his handshake was firm and quick. He didn’t smile. Jake got the impression that he was not a man who smiled often.
“Nice place you have here,” Camacho said.
“We like it,” Callie said. “Would you all like a quiet place to talk?”
The admiral stood. “I thought we could take a walk along the beach. Be a shame to drive all the way over here from Washington and not walk on the beach.”
The three men left David working on the glider at the kitchen table. He was telling Callie about servos and receivers when they went out the door.
“Nice day,” Admiral Henry muttered as they walked toward the beach trail at the end of the street.
“They’re all nice here,” Jake said. “Raw and rainy at times, but nice.”
“Luis is from the FBI.”
“Got credentials?” Camacho produced them from a pocket and passed them to Jake, who looked the ID card and badge over carefully and returned them without comment
Henry stopped at the end of the little path that led through the waist-high dune and looked right and left, up and down the beach. He turned right, south, and walked with his hands in his pockets toward die area with the fewest people. He didn’t even glance toward the ocean. Out on the horizon a large containership was making its way north, perhaps to round Cape Henlopen and go up the Delaware.
“Yesterday you wanted to know what really happened in West Virginia after Harold Strong was killed.”
“Yessir.”
“I told you the truth, but I left a few things out. Camacho here was with me that morning. We met with Trooper Keadle and the local prosecutor, guy named Don Cookman. They weren’t happy campers. They knew murder when they saw it and cooperation smacked of cover-up. So Luis got on the phone to Washington and the director of the FBI drove up along with the forensic team. We got cooperation with a capital C from then on.”
“Go on,” Jake prompted when the admiral fell silent.
The admiral turned to face him. “You’re asking too damn much, Jake.”
“I’m not asking for anything other than what I need to know to do my job.”
“Like shit”
“Would you let yourself be led along by the nose if you were me? Jesus Christ, Admiral, my predecessor was murdered! I got a wife over there”—he pointed back toward his house—“who would like to have me alive for —“
“What do you want to know?”
“Why was Strong killed? What did you tell those people in West Virginia? Why the silence on a murder? Who and what are you investigating?” He looked at Camacho. “Who the hell are you?”‘
Camacho spoke first “I’m special agent in charge of the Wash- ington-area FBI group that handles counterespionage. That’s why the locals in West Virginia cooperated. That’s why Trooper Keadle called me when you left his office Thursday. That’s why he called me when Commander Judy showed up that afternoon to search Harold Strong’s cabin.” He turned and started down the beach, still talking. Admiral Henry and Jake Grafton trailed along. “Why was Strong killed? If we knew that we would be almost there. It wasn’t personal or domestic. No way. It was a hit, a contract. He got taken out by someone who knew precisely what they were doing, a cool customer. So the hypothesis that seems most likely is that he knew something he shouldn’t. That leads us to his job — the ATA program.”
“That sea story about a Minotaur — that was true?”
”Yeah, that’s the code name. But we don’t know if it’s one guy or several,” the agent said, with a glance at Tyler Henry, who picked that moment to look out to sea.
“I thought,” Jake said, “that these spy things usually get broken when you get somebody to talk.”
“That’s the history. It’d be nice if we knew who to put the screws to to clean up this little mess. But we don’t. So right now we’re busy doing it the hard way.” He led the two naval officers along the beach as he talked and answered questions. When Jake remembered to glance out to sea, the containership was no longer in sight
“Let’s transfer Smoke Judy,” Jake suggested to the admiral.
Henry just stared at him.
“Dunedin said if I got goosey. I could get rid of him.”
“I’d rather you left him in place,” Camacho said. “I’ve already made that request to Admiral Henry and now I’ll make it to you.”
“Going to be real tough to pretend I don’t know anything.”
“You don’t know anything,” Henry growled. He jerked his thumb at Camacho. “If he talked to you for a week, you still wouldn’t know anything. I sure as hell don’t.”
An hour later, as they came single file through the dune trail, Henry said, “Now you know as much as I do, which is precious little. On Monday you tell that chief in officer personnel to tear up your retirement papers.”
“Yessir.”
“Don’t ever pull that stunt on me again, Grafton.”
“Or …”
“Don’t you abandon ship and leave me and Dunedin up to our necks alone in this sack of shit.”
After the two men had departed in the admiral’s car, Jake went back into the house. CaUie was sitting on the couch reading a book. “David got your plane fixed, but his mother called and he went home for lunch. He said he would come back later and help you fly it”
Jake nodded and poured a cup of coffee.
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Huh?”
“Jake…” Her voice had that time-to-come-clean, no-fflore- nonsense tone. That tone in her voice always got his attention, perhaps because his mother had used it so effectively some years ago.
“Admiral Henry’s my boss’s boss. Camacho’s a civilian. They drove over here to talk about a problem at the office. A classified problem. That’s all I can say. You want coffee?”
She nodded yes. When he handed it to her she said, “So you are working on the ATA program?”
“Gallie, for Christ’s sake. I told you I was. I don’t lie to you.”
She sipped her coffee for a bit. “David likes you,” she said.
It made him nervous when she shifted subjects like that “He’s a great kid,” he said noncommittally. “Honest, Callie. I tell you the truth. If something’s classified and I can’t talk about it, I just say so. You know that! You know mel”
She nodded her agreement and picked up the book. He waited a moment, slightly baffled, then wandered outside with his coffee cup in his hand. Women! Any man who thinks he’s got them figured out should be declared incompetent and incarcerated to protect himself.
The cursors were running all over the scope when it occurred to Toad to check the velocities in the inertial. They were all gone to hell. “Hold this heading,” he growled at Rita as he consulted his kneeboard cards. He pushed the buttons to take the inertial out of the system, then typed in a wind he thought would work.
“Okay,” he told her. “This run, no inertial and no radar. Com- puter dead reckoning and the IR — that’s all we’ll use. We’ll even leave the laser off. Go in at a hundred feet and let’s see if we can hit anything.” Below two hundred feet system deliveries in the A-6 were degraded, probably. Toad suspected, due to the trigonometry of low grazing angles.
