where he relieved himself. Somehow aboard ship things had been simpler, more clear. On his way back to the wooden building he saw the car returning with Harold at the wheel.
The redhead had the radar fired up in less than a minute. With Fritsche and Jake looking over his shoulder, he flipped switches. “This is its target-acquisition — its search — mode. And that blip right there is the tabernacle.” He pointed. Jake stared at the return a moment, then stepped a few paces to his right and looked around the shed at the scene. The radar in the shed made a variety of mechanical noises and he could hear the antenna banging back and forth against its stops. Now he referred again to the radar scope, which was American, not Soviet. Okay, there was the tabernacle, the house beyond and to the right, the trees on the left …
“Now,” said the young Dodgers, “step over there again and wave your arms at my dad. Then he’ll fire up the suppressor.” Jake did as requested and returned to the scope. Even as he watched, the blip that was the tabernacle faded from the screen, along with the ground return in the area beyond. Where the blip had been was merely a blank spot with no return at all.
“Try the frequency agility,” Fritsche suggested. Harold flipped another switch and then turned a dial. The tabernacle became faintly visible as a ghost image. “As he changes frequency on the Owl Screech, the computer on the suppressor is trying to keep up,” Fritsche explained to Jake, “so he sees this ghost image, which is not enough to lock on to. And remember, this is an American scope, more sensitive than Soviet scopes.”
“I’m impressed.”
“Go to a higher PRF and try to lock on the spot where we know the tabernacle is,” Fritsche said to Harold. ‘Try the expanded dis- play.”
Nothing. The radar failed to lock. The center of the presentation was an empty black spot.
After a long silence, Fritsche spoke softly, almost as if he were afraid of his own thoughts. “If we could implement this technique at optical wavelengths you wouldn’t even be able to see that build- ing down there with the naked eye.”
“You mean you could see right through it?”
“No, it would look like a black hole. Nothing would come back from it. But no one is going to have that kind of technology until well into the next century.”
“For heaven’s sake,” said a stunned Jake Grafton, “let’s just get the bugs worked out of this and get it to sea. That’s more than enough for you and me.”
The phone on Luis Camacho’s desk rang at noon on Tuesday as he was eating a tuna salad sandwich. He had mayonnaise on his fin- gers and managed to smear it on the telephone. “Camacho.” “Luis, this is Bob Pickering. Could you take a few minutes now and come down to my office? I have some folks here I would like you to meet.”
Camacho wrapped the half sandwich that remained and stuck it in his lower desk drawer, which he locked without thinking. Every drawer and cabinet in his office was always locked unless he was taking something out or putting something in. It was a habit.
Camacho knew Pickering, but not well. Pickering worked the District of Columbia and routinely handled walk- ins. “Luis, this is Mrs. Matilda Jackson and Mr. Ralph Barber. Luis Camacho.” As they shook hands, Pickering added, “Mr. Barber’s an attorney with Perguson and Waithe.” Ferguson and Waithe was one of the District’s larger firms, almost two hundred lawyers, and special- ized in federal regulatory matters.
Pickering summarized Mrs. Jackson’s adventures of the previous Friday evening while Camacho glanced at the visitors. He con- cluded, “Based on past experience, Mrs. Jackson felt that the Dis- trict police may not be sympathetic to a complaint from her, so she went to Mr. Barber, her former boss, yesterday, and he thought she should come see us.”
Barber was in his fifties, still wearing his topcoat and white silk scarf. Apparently he hoped this interview would be brief. Mrs. Jackson still had her coat around her too, but its faded cloth con- trasted sharply with the blue mohair that kept the spring winds from the lawyer’s plump frame.
“The neighborhood used to be someplace a person could be proud of,” Mrs. Jackson said slowly. “But those crack houses and dealers on the comers… The police have got to do something!”
“We felt that the information and evidence Mrs. Jackson has would probably receive a more dispassionate look from the FBI.” The counselor gestured toward the edge of Pickering’s desk, upon which lay a roll of film and a clear plastic Baggie containing a crumpled cigarette pack.
The Minotaur
“I thought you might want to send these to the lab,” Pickering told Luis. “I’ll do the report and send you a copy. We’ll get back to you in a few days, Mrs. Jackson. One of us will. Right now we need to get a set of your fingerprints to compare with whatever is on that cigarette pack. Just in case, you understand.”
Camacho jotted the report number on a piece of paper from Pickering’s desk, then excused himself. Curious about the two items he carried, he walked them straight to the lab and logged them in. Tomorrow afternoon, he was told. After three-
The Consolidated Technologies prototype had a hangar all to itself in Palmdale. As Jake stood and looked about the cavernous inte- rior, he was surrounded by engineers and vice presidents, at least twenty people all told. The vice presidents all wore business suits, but the engineers seemed fond of short-sleeved white shirts with dark ties. If that garb didn’t announce their profession, they all sported nerd buckets — plastic shirt-pocket protectors full of pens and pencils, from which dangled their building passes. Solar-pow- ered calculators rested in belt holsters on engineers and vice presi- dents alike.
The black airplane had a conventional dual nose wheel with the nose tow bar that enabled it to be launched by catapult, but that was about the only feature Jake found familiar. The rounded wings were situated well back on the fuselage and a canard protruded under each side of the canopy. Two vertical stabilizers canted in- board rose from the rear of the fuselage. The engine air intakes were on top of the plane, behind the cockpit, which seated two crewmen in tandem.
The senior vice president, a tall woman in her late forties whom Wilson had said rose from the accounting department to her pres- ent position on sheer raw talent, led the group toward the machine and explained major features to Jake. “The aircraft’s shape is opti- mized to reduce the aircraft’s Radar Cross Section. We’ve used radar-absorbent materials in all the leading and trailing edges— laminated layers of glass fiber and plastic with carbon coat- ing…”
“Uh-huh,” said Jake Grafton.
“For low frequencies that put the plane into the Rayleigh region, we’ve tried to lower the overall electromagnetic susceptibility… carbon-epoxy laminate for wing skin, coatings of multilayer ab- sorbers — mainly Schiff base salts and honeycomb composites. The goal was to reduce resonant microwave frequency scattering, mag- netic waves and even surface waves before they escape from the edges.”
“I see,” he lied. The canopy was open and the boarding ladder down, so Jake climbed up and peered into the forward cockpit- The control stick was a small vertical handle on the right side of the cockpit. Two power levers were installed on the left console. The forward panel contained two Multifunction Displays, MFDs, ar- ranged on either side of the control panel for a Heads-Up Display, a HUD, which sat on top of the forward panel so as he flew the pilot could look straight ahead through the tilted glass. Under the HUD control panel was another screen, similar to the MFDs, but without the frame of buttons that circled the upper two. All of the screens looked like eleven-inch color television screens with the power off: they were larger than the five-inch displays to which Jake was accustomed. But the weirdest thing — there were no en- gine instruments. Oh, the panel had a conventional gear lever, a standby gyro and even a G meter, but of engine instruments there were none.
“Go ahead. Climb in and sit down,” the woman urged. Jake glanced again at her name tag. Adele DeCrescentis.
“0kay.” As he arranged himself in the pilot’s seat, Ms. DeCrescentis mounted the ladder. “Where’s the ashtray?” he asked.
“Captain, I don’t think—“
“Sorry. Just kidding.” The look on her face implied that levity was inappropriate. Here in the high-tech cathedral, Jake thought Or the new-car showroom.
Down below, the entourage was making small talk among them- selves and casting many glances at the cockpit and vice president DeCrescentis, who probably didn’t look very vice presidential perched on the boarding ladder. “What’s going to happen to en- gine airflow in high-angle-of-attack maneuvers?”
“That was one of the trade-offs,” said DeCrescentis, shifting her weight gingerly. Even the medium heels she
