The Minotaur by Stephen Coonts

these years. In the
puzzle palace, the place where good ideas go to die.
    It could have been worse, of course. He could have been as-
signed to design the new officer fitness report form.
    Like many officers who spent their careers in operational billets,
Jake Grafton loathed the bureaucrats, held them in a secret con-
tempt which he tried to suppress with varying degrees of success.
In the years since World War II, the bureaucracy had grown lush
and verdant here in Washington. Every member of Congress had
twenty aides. Every social problem had a staff of paper pushers
”managing” it. The military was just as bad. Joint commands with
a staff of a thousand to fifteen hundred people were common.
    Perhaps it happens because we are human. The people in the
military endlessly analyze and train for the last war because no one
knows what the next one will be Uke. New equipment and technol-
ogies deepen the gloom which always cloaks the future. Yesterday’s
warriors retire and new ones inherit the stars and the offices, and
so it goes through generations, until at last every office is filled with
men who have never heard a shot fired in anger or known a single
problem that good, sound staff work, carefully couched in
bureaucratese, could not “manage” satisfactorily. Inevitably the
gloom becomes Stygian. Future war becomes a profound enigma
that workaday admirals and generals and congressmen cannot pen-
etrate. So the staffs proliferate as each responsible person seeks
expert help with his day-to-day duties and the insoluble policy
conundrums.
    Another war would be necessary to teach the new generation the
ancient truths. But in the Pax Americana following World War II,
Vietnam accelerated the damage rather than arrested it.
    In its aftermath Vietnam appeared to many as the first inadver-
tent, incautious step toward the nuclear inferno that would destroy
life on this planet. Frightened by the new technologies and fearful
of the incomprehensible political forces at work throughout the
world, citizens and soldiers sought—demanded—quantifiable
truths and controls that would prevent the war that bad become
unthinkable, the future war that had become, for the generations
that had known only peace, the ultimate obscenity. Laws and regu-
lations and incomprehensible organizational charts multiplied like
bacteria in a petri dish. Engineers with pocket calculators became
soothsayers to the terrified.
    All of this Jake Grafton knew, and knowing it, was powerless to
change. And now he was one of them, one of the faceless savants
charged with creating salvation on his desk and placing it in the
out basket.
    Over on the beach it was probably raining like this. The wind
would be moaning around the house and leaking around the win-
dowpanes. The surf would be pounding on the sand. It would be a
great evening for a walk along the beach under a gray sky, by that
gray sea. Suddenly he felt an overpowering longing to feel the wind
in his hair and the salt air in his nostrils.
    Oh, to be there and not here! Not here with the problems and the
hassles and the responsibilities.
    His eye fell upon the bag that the clerk had placed the F-I17
model in. He ripped out the staple and slid the box from the bag.
The artist had painted the plane black. It had twin vertical stabiliz-
ers, slanted in at the bottom, and flat sides all over the place, all of
which he suspected were devilishly expensive to manufacture. The
intakes were on top of the fuselage, behind the canopy. How would
the engines get air when the pilot was pulling Gs, maneuvering? He
stared at the picture. No doubt this plane was fly-by-wire with a
flight control computer stabilizing the machine and automatically
trimming. But what would it feel like to fly it? What would be the
weight and performance penalty to get this thing aboard ship?
How much were they going to cost? Could these machines ever be
worth the astronomical sums the manufacturers would want to
charge? The politicians would