by Ben Bova
“My activities while not on duty are not subject to Air Force jurisdiction, sir,” Karen had replied, knowing it was a pathetically weak defense.
“They are subject to United States Air Force jurisdiction when they reflect dishonorably on the service!” the judge had snapped at her.
Karen lapsed into silence. Her USAF-appointed lawyer, a light colonel like herself, had advised her that silence was her best defense.
Not that it did her any good. They couldn’t get Brad’s name out of her, so they bounced her out of her job with the B-2 squadron and stuck her in a dumbbell assignment driving a cargo plane on milk runs.
But the cargo plane turned out to be ABL-1. Nobody expected the plane to do anything but fly racetrack courses over the open ocean and shoot its laser at simulated targets. Nobody expected the North Koreans to start World War III or ABL-1 to be sent on this mission to stop the war before it started. Nobody expected Lieutenant Colonel Karen Christopher to be placed at the pivotal point of world history.
“Uh, Colonel, ma’am?”
Karen snapped her eyes open. Lieutenant Sharmon was standing over her, looking a little embarrassed.
She pushed herself up to a sitting position. “What is it, Jon?”
“I’ve got the numbers on how long we can stooge around waiting for the tanker. They don’t look good.”
U.S. Route 12, Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho
Out of the corner of his eye Charley Ingersoll noticed the gas gauge’s warning light flicker. The highway was blanketed with snow now; the clouds were low and dark. We ought to be outrunning this dratted storm, Charley fumed to himself, but instead it’s just getting worse. He wished he’d put in new wiper blades before starting on this stupid trip; the wipers were smearing his windshield so badly he could hardly see outside.
They’d stopped at two more gas stations, but both of them had no electricity, either, so they couldn’t pump gas. We’re not going to make it home unless we can fill the ever-loving tank, Charley knew.
The warning light glowed steadily now, a little yellow eye that told Charley he was in real trouble. What to do? What to do? Push on until we run out of gas or pull over and keep the car heated until a snowplow comes by?
Martha was still fiddling with the radio, trying to get a local station.
“Try the cell phone again,” Charley said. His wife shook her head. “It doesn’t work. I’ve tried it a dozen times and it doesn’t work.”
“Try it again, dammit!”
She looked shocked at his language, but picked the cell phone off the console between their seats and pecked at it.
“Nothing,” she said, almost as if she were happy about it.
At least the kids were quiet in the backseat. They’d peed and eaten a couple of granola bars. That ought to keep them satisfied for a while, Charley thought.
“Stay in the middle!” Martha yelped as Charley maneuvered the van around a curve. There was no guardrail and she was on the open side. The snow was so thick now that Charley couldn’t see how far a drop it was on her side.
“I’m only doing forty,” he growled. He didn’t tell her that the road felt slick, slippery in spots.
The radio crackled with the distant voice of a sportscaster reporting that the Seattle Seahawks expected to have perfect football weather for Sunday’s game against the San Diego Chargers.
Big fornicating deal, Charley grumbled to himself.
At least a snowplow had been through this stretch of highway, Charley realized. There was less than an inch of snow on the roadway. Good, he thought, leaning a little more heavily on the accelerator. Fifty miles an hour. That’s better than—
There was ice under the coating of snow and the van suddenly spun a full circle before Charley could do anything about it. Martha screamed and the kids yelled. The van smacked sideways into a mound of snow on the shoulder of the road, with Charley jamming both his feet on the brake.
Charley could feel his heart hammering beneath his ribs. Martha was sobbing. Glancing over his shoulder Charley saw that both the kids seemed okay. White-faced and wide-eyed, but unhurt. Their seat belts had kept them from being banged around.
“You okay back there?” he asked, surprised at how his voice shook.
“Yessir,” said Charley Jr. “I think so.”
“Me too,” Little Martha echoed.
“How about you?” Charley asked his wife.
“My chest hurts.”
“The seat belt must have caught you.”
“I think I’m having a heart attack.”
“You’re not having a heart attack. It’s just the seat belt. I bet I’m bruised too.”
From the backseat Little Martha piped up. “Can we go outside and make a snowman?”
Japan: Misawa Air Force Base
Major Joseph E. Dugan, USAF, had learned one vitally important thing in his military career: when you need a job done, and done right the first time, get an experienced noncom to do it.
He stood in a lightly misting rain in front of the hangar closest to the flight line and watched befuddled maintenance crews towing planes out into the drizzle and parking them helter-skelter across the apron.
Standing beside him was Technical Sergeant Aaron “Scrap Iron” Clinton, hard-eyed and humorless, his skin as dark as an eggplant, fists planted on the hips of his rumpled fatigues, an unlit cigar clamped in his teeth. The “seegar,” as Clinton called them, was Clinton’s hallmark. He never smoked them. He chewed them.
When Joe Dugan’s old friend and senior major, Hank Wilson, had commanded him to have the incoming KC-135 refitted with a replacement engine in one hour or less after its landing, Dugan fell back on his crucial piece of military wisdom. He sprinted over to the base maintenance center and hollered for Sergeant Clinton.
“Sergeant,” he bellowed, “there’s a KC-135 tanker due in here in twenty minutes. It’s got to have an engine replaced and be back in the air in one hour.”
Sergeant Clinton had been through a lot in his Air Force career. Twice he had been broken down to airman for getting caught with his pants down in married women’s bedrooms. Three times he had been offered a chance for a commission—and refused.
“I ain’t officer material,” he had insisted in his stubborn Arkansas drawl. “I work for a livin’.”
Now this white major was demanding the impossible. Clinton saluted and said, around his unlit cigar, “One hour. Yes, sir!”
That was why, as the ailing KC-135 taxied right into the hangar that had been emptied for it, its pilot stared goggle-eyed at the small army of technicians in Air Force fatigues who swarmed around the plane even while its engines were wheezing to a stop.
“Holy shit!” the pilot exclaimed. “It looks like a pit crew from the Indianapolis 500 out there!”
ABL-1: Cockpit
“Colonel, I’ve got the fuel bingo calculated.” Karen Christopher nodded as she sat at the controls of ABL-1. “Plug it into the flight plan, Jon,” she said to her navigator.
Shannon’s voice in her headphone sounded reluctant. “I don’t have really good numbers for wind velocities, Colonel. With the satellites down and all...”
“Give me three estimates,” said Colonel Christopher. “Best case, worst case, and the average between them.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
In a few minutes numbers began to flicker on the control panel’s central display screen. Christopher watched them scroll by, then they steadied and held still.
In the right-hand seat, Major Kaufman grunted, glanced at the panel’s digital clock, then checked his wristwatch. “Thirty-eight minutes. Then we gotta turn back for Misawa.”
“That’s the worst case,” the colonel said. “If the winds don’t buck us too hard we can stretch it another ten, fifteen minutes.”
Kaufman said nothing, but the look on his face told Christopher what he thought of stretching their luck. She gave him a faint smile. “Think we should put on our life vests, Obie, just in case?”
&nb
sp; “That ain’t funny,” Kaufman muttered.
Christopher tapped the side of her helmet where the headphone was built in and called, “Brick, anything from Misawa about our tanker?”
O’Banion’s voice replied, “Nothing since they reported the bird landed, Colonel.”
Kaufman grumbled, “Misawa can’t talk to us, so they send the word to Washington and Washington relays the poop to us. Helluva way to run a mission.”
“Communications are snarled up,” Christopher said. But inwardly she agreed with her copilot. Communications were vital and this Top Secret mission was at the end of a long and very shaky tether.
“Wind velocity’s picking up some,” Sharmon reported.
With a nod, Colonel Christopher realized that they were facing the navigator’s worst-case option. Fuel bingo in twenty-nine minutes, she calculated. Looking out at the swirl of gray clouds covering the ocean below, she thought, If we go down it’ll be into a nasty bit of weather. Ditching a plane this size into a cold ocean in the middle of a major storm. Not a good career move.
Harry was sitting by himself in the cramped little galley beneath the flight deck. There were no windows to see outside, but he sensed that the plane was turning, leaning slightly to the left side as it made a wide, cumbersome turn.
Are we turning back? he wondered. Maybe I should check with Colonel Christopher. If we’re going back, then I could make it known to whoever tried to screw up the mission that he can relax, the mission’s scrubbed.
As he grasped his lukewarm mug of coffee with both hands Harry asked himself for the thousandth time: Who is it? Which one of them tried to stop this mission? Who took that optics assembly?
He sat in one of the galley’s undersized bucket seats and tried to puzzle it all out. Beam control is Monk’s job. He knows the most about it; it’d be easiest for him to take out the lens assembly. But he couldn’t have gone up there once we took off—the flight crew would have seen him. Whoever it was must’ve removed the assembly before we took off. And he hid it somewhere on the plane, most likely. Where? Maybe if I can find the lens assembly it’ll tell me something about who took it.
But Harry shook his head. Maybe if I could dust it for fingerprints. Not even then, he realized. Monk, Taki, Wally, even Angel had enough time to sneak up to the flight deck last night while we were doing the preflight and take the assembly out of the ranging laser. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to lift the assembly out of its fitting. It’s designed to pop in or pop out, just like Monk said.
Why? Harry demanded silently. Why would any one of them want to scrub this mission? Is he a spy, for Chrissakes? With a disgusted shake of his head, Harry reasoned, No, that couldn’t be it. None of us knew we were flying into a shooting war when we took off. We all thought it was going to be just another milk run.
Not a spy, then. Not an enemy agent. No James Bond stuff. But then why the hell did he do it?
And did he cause the explosion out on the Mohave? Did he kill Pete?
Harry sat there mulling his thoughts over and over again. Slowly he began to think that he really didn’t want to know. One of my people is a saboteur, at least. Maybe a murderer. I don’t want to know who it is.
But he realized even so that he had to know. He had to find out. I can’t let him try again. He might kill us all, for god’s sake. Or her. Maybe it’s Taki. Is there something in her background that I don’t know about? Something that makes her willing to commit suicide to stop this mission? She’s third - or fourth - generation American, but is there some of the kamikaze spirit inside her?
He gulped at his tepid coffee, got to his feet, and went to the tiny stainless steel sink to rinse out the mug. You’re going nutso, he said to himself. Absolutely dingbat. Taki’s no Japanese spy, for Chrissake.
But somebody removed the lens assembly. One of my people. Somebody who figured that would be the simplest and least dangerous way to abort the mission. Knock out the ranging laser and we’re out of business.
Who? Who?
Harry leaned against the sink, his mind spinning. Then he stood up straight and went to the galley’s hatch. Instead of standing around asking yourself questions, he reasoned, go out and do something. Find the missing lens assembly. Maybe where the guy hid it will tell you who it was.
It wasn’t much, but it was all that Harry could think of doing.
The Pentagon: Situation Room
Zuri Coggins looked up from her mini’s screen and announced, “The President’s landed at San Francisco International.”
Michael Jamil turned in his chair to face the wall screen that showed CNN, Fox News, and three other news channels. None of them was showing the President’s arrival in Air Force One. There must be a crowd at the airport to greet him, Jamil thought, his brows furrowing. That’s why he landed at the commercial airport instead of a military base. Why aren’t the news nets covering his arrival?
And then it hit him. The satellites are out. No instant news coverage from the West Coast. I’ll bet they don’t even have coaxial cables anymore to carry TV across the continent.
General Scheib was also bent over his laptop screen. “The tanker’s taken off from Misawa,” he said. “Should make rendezvous with ABL-1 in about one hour.”
General Higgins came down the table and bent over Scheib’s shoulder. “Will your plane have enough fuel to make the rendezvous?”
Without looking up at Higgins, Scheib muttered, “That’s a decision the pilot has to make.”
“The tanker’s on its way! Took off ten minutes ago!” O’Banion called so loudly that Karen Christopher could hear him through the open cockpit hatch even with her helmet on.
“ETA?” Christopher said into her lip mike.
It took several moments before O’Banion replied, more softly, “Sixty-eight minutes.”
Major Kaufman leaned toward Christopher. “That’s way past our bingo point.”
The colonel nodded slowly, her mind racing. “We have enough fuel to wait for the tanker. Once we make rendezvous we can refill our tanks.”
Kaufman’s face showed what he thought of that. “And what if the goddamned tanker breaks down again? What if it misses the rendezvous? There’s a big storm blowing down there. We can’t sit here and wait till our tanks run dry!”
“The tanker’s on its way,” Colonel Christopher said firmly.
“And we’re supposed to orbit around here and hope the damned tanker finds us?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s crazy!”
“The tanker will be here before we run dry, Obie. This is no time to panic.”
“So when is the time to panic? When we’re in the drink, in the middle of a goddamned typhoon?”
A fragment of memory flashed through Colonel Christopher’s mind, a legend she had heard while in the academy about a B-17 mission over Germany during World War II. With Nazi fighter planes swarming in on them, the copilot of the Flying Fortress screamed that they had to turn back, get away. The pilot unlimbered his service revolver and threatened to blow the copilot’s head off if he didn’t shut up and do his job. Karen regretted that she hadn’t packed her service pistol on this flight.
“I’ll tell you when it’s time to panic, Obie,” she said coolly. “Now keep your voice down, you’re frightening the kids.”
Kaufman stared at her, his baggy-eyed face a mixture of anger, fear, and disbelief.
“You’re gonna stooge around here until we run out of fuel?” he asked, his voice lower.
“Until the tanker shows up,” Christopher corrected. “And then we’re going to shoot down any goddamned missile those goddamned gooks launch.”
ABL-1: Lavatory
And there it was, tucked in behind the spare packs of toilet paper.
Harry had searched the galley and the compartment where he and his team sat during takeoffs and landings, knowing that whoever took the lens assembly wouldn’t stash it in such an obvious place but looking in the obvious places first. He worked
his way back along the COIL’s long, bulky length, sticking his nose into every corner and cranny he saw. Nothing. Rosenberg and Angel Reyes watched him with some bemusement on their faces as Harry sniffed and peeked and ducked under the tanks that held the big laser’s fuel.
He started back, intending to check out Taki’s station. Somebody could stick the lens assembly inside one of the consoles there, or even between consoles; the assembly wasn’t much bigger than the palm of his hand.
The plane seemed to be turning again; Harry felt the sway as the lumbering jet slowly banked right. Again he wondered if he should ask Colonel Christopher what was going down, but again he decided that she probably had her hands full and didn’t need anybody pestering her. She had made it painfully clear that she regarded Harry and his team as a bunch of tech geeks. Well, he mused, that’s what we are, really. Besides, I’ve got my own job to do.
He had to urinate. The lavatory was next to the galley and Harry pushed through the accordion door. On an impulse he bent down and opened the sliding door to the compartment that held the extra toilet paper and paper towels. The boxes looked jumbled, not in a neat stack. Harry pulled a couple of them out and there was the lens assembly.
Harry squatted down and stared at it, his need to urinate forgotten. In his mind he tried to re-create the scene. Whoever yanked the assembly out of the ranging laser must have done it last night, while we were going through the preflight inspection. He knew the rest of us were in the plane and he only had a couple of minutes to hide it. He could carry it down from the flight deck and right through the battle management station, even if Taki was sitting there. She’d be focused on her console with her back to whoever was passing through the area. Besides, the assembly was small enough to hold in your hand, and even if she turned around or glanced over her shoulder she probably wouldn’t have noticed it.
