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with the Soviets in Western Europe is
pretty small—no way to prevent it from going nuclear and the
Russians don’t want that any more than we do. But we must pre-
pare to fight it, prepare to some degree, or we can’t deter it. I’d say
it’s a lot more likely we’ll end up with more limited wars, like
Korea or Vietnam or Afghanistan or the Persian Gulf or the Mid-
dle East or South Africa. So the capability to fight those wars is
critical. We need planes that can fly five hundred miles through a
high-density electronic environment, deliver a devastating conven-
tional punch, and return to the carrier to fly again, and again and
again. Without that capability our carrier battle groups are an ex-
pensive liability and not an asset. We need that plane by 1995, at
the latest.”
    “You’re implying that our plane can’t rely on pinpoint missiles
for weapons.”
    “Precisely. The air force has a lot of concrete to park their spe-
cialized planes on; carrier deck space is damn precious. We can’t
build planes that can only shoot missiles that cost a million bucks
each, then push them into the drink when we run out of missiles.
We have to be able to hit hard in any foreseeable conflict with
simple, cheap weapons, like laser-guided bombs.”
    “So we can do something the air force couldn’t with the F-117?”
    Henry threw his head back and grinned, obviously enjoying him-
self. “We aren’t going to trade away our plane’s performance or
mission capability.”
    “But how—“
    “Better design—we learned a lot from the F-117—plus Athena.
Active stealth technology.” His mood was gloomy again. “I think
the fucking Russians have gotten everything there was to get out of
the F-117 and B-2. Every single technical breakthrough, they’ve
stolen it. They don’t appear to be using that knowledge and they
may not ever be able to do so. This stuff involves manufacturing
capabilities they don’t have and costs they can’t afford to incur.
But what they can do is figure out defenses to a stealthed-up air-
plane, and you can bet your left nut they’re working their asses off
on that right this very minute.”
    He looked carefully around. ‘There’s a Russian mole in the
Pentagon.” His voice was almost a whisper, although the nearest
pedestrian was a hundred yards away. “He gave them the stealth
secrets. The son of a bitch is buried in there someplace and he’s
ripping us off. He’s even been given a top secret code name—
Minotaur.” He scuffed his toe at a pebble on the sidewalk. “I’m not
supposed to know this. It goes without saying that if I’m not, you
sure as hell aren’t.”
    “How’d—“
    “Don’t ask. I don’t want you to know. But if I know the Mi-
notaur’s there, you can lay money he knows we know he’s there. So
the bastard is dug in with his defenses up. We may never get him.
Probably won’t.”
    “How do we know he gave them stealth?”
    “We know. Trust me. We know,”
    “So we have a mole in the Kremlin.”
    “I didn’t say that,” Henry said fiercely, “and you had damn well
better not. No shit, Grafton, don’t even whisper that to a living
fucking soul.”
    They walked along in silence, each man occupied with his own
thoughts. Finally Jake said, “So how are we gonna do it?”
    “Huh?”
    “How are we going to build a stealth Intruder and keep the
technology in our pocket?”
    “I haven’t figured that one out yet,” Henry said slowly. “You
see, everything the Russians have gotten so far is passive—tech-
niques to minimize the radar cross section and heat signature. To
build a mission-capable airplane like we want we’re going to have
to use active techniques. Project Athena. They haven’t stolen
Athena yet and we don’t want them to get it.”
    “Active techniques?” Jake prompted, unable to contain his curi-
osity.
    “Wre going to cancel the bad guys’ radar signal when it
reaches our plane. We’ll automatically generate a signal that