Minotaur

THERE'S NO GREATER RUSH THAN WORKING FOR THE MILITARY'S BLACK OPS—THE POWER, THE SECRECY, THE CASUALTIES. AS LONG AS YOU DON'T THINK ABOUT IT. AS LONG AS YOU DON'T TALK ABOUT IT

Kenny I hadn't seen in, what, three, four years. Kenny started with me way back when, the two of us standing there with our hands in our pants right outside the wormhole. Kenny wanders into the Windsock last night like the Keith Richards version of himself with this girl who looks like some movie star's daughter. "Is that you?" he says to me when he spots me in a booth. "This is the guy you're always talking about?" Carly asks once we're a few minutes into the conversation. The girl's name turns out to be Celestine. Every so often talking to me he gets distracted and we have to wait until he takes his mouth away from hers.

"So my husband brings you up all the time, and then when I ask what you did together he always goes, 'I can't help you there,'" Carly tells him. "Which of course he knows I know. But he likes to say it anyway."

Celestine with her fingers brings his cheek over toward her, like no one's talking, and once they're kissing, she works on gently opening his mouth with hers. After a while he makes a sound that's apparently the one she wanted to hear, and she disengages and returns her attention to us.

"How's your wife?" Carly asks him.

Kenny tells her that they're separated and that she settled down with a project manager from Lockheed.

"Nice to meet you," Carly tells Celestine.

"Mmm-hmm," Celestine says.

The wormhole for Kenny and me was what people in the indus­try call the black world. The black world's all about those projects that are so far off the books that you're not even allowed to put classified in the gap in your resume afterward. You're told when you're recruited that people in the know will know and that when it comes to everybody else you shouldn't give a shit.

If you want to know how big the black world is, go click on comptroller and then research and development on the DOD's website and make a list of the line items with names like Ceru­lean Blue and budgets listed as no number. Then compare the number of budget items you can add up to the total from the DOD's printed budget. There's an eye-opener for you home actu­aries: You're looking at a 40 billion dollar difference.

Black world is everywhere: Regular air bases have restricted compounds; defense industries have permanently segregated sites. And anywhere no one else in (continued on page 90)

minotaur

(continued from page 69) his right mind is likely to go in the South­west, there's a black base: Drive along a wash in the back of nowhere in Nevada and you'll suddenly hit a newish fence that goes on forever. Follow the fence and you'll encounter some bland-looking guys in an unmarked pickup. Refuse to do what they say and they'll shoot the tires out from under you and give you a lift to the county lockup.

All of this was before 9/11. You can imag­ine what it's like now.

Kenny for a while helped out at Groom Lake as an engineering trouble-shooter for a C-5 airlift squadron that flew only late-night operations, ferry­ing classified aircraft from the aero­space plants to the test sites. They had a patch that featured a crescent moon over noyfb. "None of Your Fucking Business," he explained when I first saw it. He said that during the downtime he hung with the stealth bomber guys with their huge deposit-no return jackets, and he told his wife when she asked that he worked in the Nellis Range, which was a little like telling someone that you worked in the Alps.

I'd met him a few years earlier when Minotaur was hatched out at Lockheed's Skunk Works. He'd been brought in for the sister program, Minion. We were developing an ATOP—an Advanced Tech­nology Observation Platform—and even over the crapper it read furtim viGILANS:

VIGILANCE THROUGH STEALTH.

It wasn't the secrecy as much as the slo­gans and patches and badges that drove Carly nuts. "Only here would you guys have patches for secret programs," she said. "Like what're we supposed to do? Be intrigued} Guess what's going on?"

In the old days Kenny's unit had as its symbol the mushroom, and under it in Latin: always in the dark. Black world's big on patches and Latin. I had one for Minotaur that read doing gods work with other peoples money. I'd heard there was a unit out at Point Mugu that had the ultimate patch: just a black-on-black circle.

"Gustatus Similis Pullus," Carly said. She was tilting her head to read an oval yellow patch on Kenny's shoulder.

"You know Latin?" he asked.

"Do you know how long I've been tired of this?" she told him.

"/ don't know Latin," Celestine volun­teered.

"Tastes Like Chicken," he translated.

"Nice," Carly told him.

"I don't get it," Celestine said.

"Neither does she," he told her.

"Ooo. Snap," Carly said.

"People're supposed to taste like chicken," I finally told them.

"Oh, right," Carly said. "So what're you guys, supposed to eat people?"

"That's what we do: We eat people," Kenny agreed. He made teeth with his

forefingers and thumbs and had them bite up and down.

Carly gave him a head shake and turned her attention to the bar. "Are we gonna order?" she asked.

It's all info war now. Delivering or screwing up content. We can convince a surface-to-air missile that it's a Maytag dryer. Tell an over-the-horizon radar array that it's through for the day or that it wants to play music. And we've got look-down capabilities that can tell you from space whether your aunt's having a Diet Coke or a regular.

What Carly's forgetting is that it's not just about teasing. There's something to be said for esprit de corps. There's all that home-team stuff.

I heard from various sources that Kenny's been all over: Kirdand, Hanscom, White Sands, Groom Lake, Tonopah. "What's my motto?" he said, in front of his wife, the last time I saw him. "A life­time of silence." "A lifetime of silence," she answered back, as though he'd told her in the nicest possible way to go fuck herself.

What's it like? Carly asked me once. Not being able to tell the people you're closest to anything about what you care about most? She was talking about how upset I was at Kenny's having just dropped off the face of the earth. He'd gone off to his new assignment with­out a backward glance some two weeks before, with not even a Have a good one, bucko left behind on a Post-it. She was talking about having just come home from a good vacation with her husband and having had him throw his drink onto the roof because of an e-mail in response to some inquiries that read, No can do, in terms of a back tell. Your Hansel stipulated no bread crumbs.

The glass had rolled back off the shin­gles into the azalea. By way of explaining the duration of my upset, I'd let her in on a little of what I'd risked by just that one fishing expedition.

I'd asked if she had any idea how long it took to get the kind of security clear­ance her breadwinner toted around. How many federates with pocket protec­tors had fine-tooth-combed my every last Visa bill.

"I almost said hello to you two Christ-mases ago," Kenny told me. "Out at SWC in Schriever."

"You were at SWC in Schriever?" I asked.

"Oh, for Christ's sake," Carly said. "Don't talk like this if you're not going to tell us what it means."

"The Space Warfare Center in Colo­rado," Kenny said. He shrugged when he saw my face. "Let's give the bad guys a fighting chance," he said.

"I didn't know we had a Space Warfare Center," Celestine said.

"A Space Warfare Center?" Kenny asked her.

At our rehearsal dinner, now three years back in the rearview mirror, Carly's college roommate said during a lull at

our table, "I never had a black eye, but I always kinda wished I did." And Carly looked surprised and said. "Well, I licked one all over once." And everybody looked at her. "You licked a black eye?" I finally asked. And Carly went, "Oh. 1 thought she said black guy."

"You licked a black guy all over?" I asked her later that night. She couldn't see my face in the dark, but she knew what I was getting at.

"I did. And it was so good," she said. Then she put a hand on the inside of each of my knees and spread my legs as wide as she could spread them.

"What's the biggest secret you think I ever kept from you?" she asked during our most recent relocation, which was last Memorial Day. We had a parakeet in the backseat and were bouncing a U-Haul over a road that you would have said hadn't seen vehicular traffic in 25 years. I'd been lent out to Northrop and couldn't even tell her for how long.

"I don't know," I told her. "I figured you had nothing but secrets." And she dropped the subject, and then for two weeks I went through her e-mails.

"I don't know anything about this Kenny guy," she told me the day I threw the drink, "except that you can't get over that he disappeared."

"You know, sometimes you just register a connection," 1 told her later that night in bed. "And not talking about it doesn't have to be some big deal."

"So it was kind of a romantic thing," she said.

"Yeah, it was totally physical," I told her. "Like you and your mom."

Carly had gotten this far by telling herself that compartmentalizing wasn't all bad: that some doors may have been shut off but that the really important ones were wide open. And in terms of intimacy, she was far and away as good as things were going to get for me. We had this look we gave each other in pub­lic that said, / know. I already thought that. We'd both been engaged when we met, and we'd stuck with each other through a lot of other people's crap. Late at night we lay nose to nose in the dark and told each other stuff no one else had heard us say. I told her about some of the times I'd been a dick, and she told me about a kid she'd miscarried and about another she'd put up for adoption when she was 17. She had no idea where he was now. But a day didn't go by that she didn't think about it. We called them both Little Jimmy. And lor a while there was all of this magical thinking of our not asking each other all that much because we thought we already knew.

That not-being-on-the-same-page thing had become a bigger issue for me lately, though she didn't know that. Which is perfect, she would have said.

What I'd been working on at that point had gone south a little. Another way of putting it would be to say that what I was doing was wrong. The ATOP

we'd developed for Minotaur had been an unarmed drone that could hover above one spot in a way a satellite couldn't, providing instant look-down for as long as a battlefield commander wanted it. But how long had it taken for us to retrofit them with air-to-surface missiles? And how many Fiats and Citroens have those drones now taken out because somebody back in Langley thought some target was in the car?

And there was an army of us out there up to the same sorts of high jinks and not able to talk about it. Where I worked, every­thing was black: not only the test flights but the resupply, the maintenance, the search and rescue. And the security scrutiny never went away. The guy who led my last proj­ect team, at home when he went to bed, after he hit the lights, waved to the surveil­lance guys. His wife never understood why even in August they had to do everything under the sheets.

On black-world patches you see a lot of sigmas because that's the engineering sym­bol for the unknown value.

"The Minotaur's the one in the laby­rinth, right?" the materials guy in my proj­ect team asked the first day. When 1 told him it was, he wanted to know if the Mino­taur was supposed to know where it was going or if it was lost too. That'd be funny, I told him. And we joked about the mon­ster and the hero just wandering around through all these dark corridors, nobody finding anybody.

And now here I was and here Kenny was, and here was poor Carly trying to get a fix on either of us. "So what brings you to this neck of the woods?" I finally asked once we were well into our second drinks.

"You know how sad he was," Carly asked, "when he couldn't get in touch with you anymore?"

"How sad?" Kenny asked. Celestine seemed curious too.

"I thought we were gonna have to get him some counseling," Carly told him.

"It's hard to adjust to not being with me anymore," Kenny told her.

"So did he ever talk to you about me?" she asked.

"You came up," Kenny told her. And even Celestine picked up on the unpleasantness.

"I'm listening," Carly said.

"Oh, he was all hot to trot whenever he talked about you," Kenny said.

"Sang my praises, did he?" Carly said. Her face had the expression she gets when somebody's tracked something into the house.

"When he wasn't shooting himself in the foot about you, he was pretty happy," Kenny said. "I called it his Good Woman face."

"As in, I had one," I explained.

"Whenever he tied himself in knots about something I called it his Little Jimmy face," he said. When Carly swung around toward him, he said, "Sorry, chief."

"That was a comic thing for you?" Carly asked me. "That was the kind of thing you'd tell like a funny story?"

"I never thought it was a funny story," I told her.

"There's his Little Jimmy face now," Kenny noted. When she looked at him again, he used his index fingers to pull down on his lower eyelids and made an Emmett Kelly frown.

"We started calling potential targets Little Jimmies when it seemed like we were going to be bringing the hammer down in ways that would maximize col­lateral damage," he said.

Carly was looking at something in front of her the way you try not to move even your eyes to keep from throwing up. "What

is that supposed to mean?" she finally said in a low voice.

"You know," Kenny told her, "'1 don't wike the wooks of this....'"

"Is that Elmer Fluid you're doing?" Celes-tine wanted to know.

And how could you not laugh, watching him do his poor-sap-in-the-crosshairs shtick?

"This is just the fucking House of Mirth, isn't it?" Carly said. Because she saw on my face just how many doors she'd been dealing with all along, open and shut, and she also saw that We're in the boat, you're in the water expression that guys cut from our project teams always saw when they asked if there was anything we could do to keep them onboard.

'Jesus Fucking Christ," she said to her­self, because her paradigm had just shifted beyond what even she would have imag­ined. She thought she'd put up with how­ever many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she'd just Figured out that as far as Fort Hubby went, she hadn't even gotten to the castle courtyard yet.

Because here's the thing we hadn't talked about, nose to nose on our pillows in the dark: the way I've never been closer to anyone was not the same as We're so close. That night I threw the drink, she asked why / was so perfect for the black world, and I wanted to tell her, How am I not perfect for it? It's a sinkhole for resources. Everyone involved with it obsesses about it all the time. Even what the insiders know about it is incomplete. Those stories you do get arrive without context. What's not inconclusive is enigmatic, what's not enig­matic is unreliable, and what's not unreli­able is quixotic.

She hasn't left yet, which surprises me, let me tell you. The waitress is showing some alarm at Carly's upset, and I've got a hand on her back. She accepts a little rubbing and then has to pull away. "I gotta get out of here," she goes.

"That girl is not happy," Celestine says after she's gone.

"Does she even know about your kid?" Kenny asks.

The waitress asks if there's going to be a third round. "What'd you do that for?" I ask him.

"What I'd do that for?" Kenny asks.

Celestine leans into him. "Can we go?" she asks. "Will you take me back to the room}"

"So are you going after her?" Kenny asks.

"Yeah," I tell him.

'Just not right now?" Kenny goes.

I'd told Carly when I first noticed him. I'd heard about this guy in design in a sister program who'd raised a stink about hous­ing the designers next to the production floor so there'd be on-the-spot back-and-forth about problems as they developed. He was 27 at that point. I'd heard that he was so good at aerodynamics that his co-workers claimed he could see air. As he moved up we had more dealings with him at Minotaur. He had zero patience for the corporate side, and when the programs rolled out their annual reports on perfor­mance and everyone did their song and dance with charts and graphs, when his turn came he'd walk to the blackboard and write two numbers. He'd point to the first

and go, "That's how many we presold," and point to the second and go, "That's how much we made," and then toss the chalk on the ledge and announce he was going back to work. He wanted to pick my brain about my way of hiding budgetary items on Minotaur and invited me over to his house and served hard liquor and martini olives. His wife hadn't come out of the bedroom. I asked after an hour if they had any crackers, and he said no.

That last time I saw him, it was like he'd had me over just to watch him fight with his wife. I'd gotten there, he'd handed me a Jose Cuervo and gone after her. "What put a bug \nyour ass?" she'd finally shouted. And after he'd gone to score us some more Cuervo, she'd said, "Would you please get outta here? Because you're not helping at all." So I'd followed him into the kitchen to tell him I was hitting the road, but it was like he'd disappeared in his own house.

And on the drive home, I'd pieced together, in that groping-in-the-dark way that I had, that he was better at this whole lockdown-on-everybody-near-you thing than I was. And worse at it. He fell into it easier and was more wrecked by it than I would ever be.

I told Carly that when I got home, and she said, "Everyone's more wrecked by everything than you'll ever be."

And she'd asked me right then if I thought I was worth the work that was going to be involved in my renovation. By which she meant, she explained, that she needed to know if/ was going to put in the work. Because she didn't intend to be in this alone. I was definitely willing to put in the work, I told her. And because of that she said that so was she.

And she couldn't have done anything more for me than that. Meaning she's that amazing, and I'm that far gone. Because there's one thing I could tell her that I haven't told anybody else, including Kenny. At Penn my old Classics professor had been a big-time pacifist—he always went on about having been in Chicago in '68—and on the last day of "Dike, Eros and Arete" he made an announcement to the class that one of our number had signed up with the military. I thought to myself: Fuck you. 1 can do whatever I want. I was already the odd man out in that class, the one whose comments made everyone look away and then move on. A pretty girl who I'd asked out shot me a look and then gave herself a pursed-lips little smile and checked her daily planner.

"So wish him luck," my old prof said, "as he commends himself over to the god­dess of Chaos." "Good luck," I remember somebody called out. And I remember being enraged that I might be turning colors. "About whom," the prof went on, "Homer wrote, 'Whose wrath is relent­less. Who, tiny at first, grows until her head plows through heaven as she strides the earth. Who hurls down bitterness. Who breeds suspicion and divides. And who, everywhere she goes, makes our pain proliferate.'"