by Ben Bova
Harry accepted it as a compliment, thinking, If Monk took the assembly he knows there’s nobody else’s prints on it. He’ll go back to where he stashed it and wipe it down, clean off any fingerprints on it.
But then he thought, Maybe he was smart enough to wipe it down before he stashed it in the lav. Maybe I’m not a Sherlock Holmes after all.
And he realized that Monk was only one possible culprit out of four. So what do I do now? He wondered.
“Message from the tanker!” O’Banion sang out.
“Pipe it to me,” said Karen Christopher.
“ABL-1, this is your friendly flying gas station. Sorry we’re late.”
“Better late than never,” Colonel Christopher said happily into her lip mike. “Where are you?”
“Three miles behind you and four thousand feet below. We’re coming up as fast as we can.”
Kaufman twisted around in his chair and did his best to look behind and below the plane.
“Very good,” said the colonel. “We’re glad to see you. We’re running on fumes, just about.”
“We’ll take care of that. You need anything else, Colonel? Windshield wiped? Oil change? Tires rotated?”
Karen laughed. “Just fill our tanks, thanks.” She turned to Kaufman. “Feel better, Obie?”
He gave her a halfhearted grin. “You should’ve been a test pilot: more guts than brains.”
Colonel Christopher nodded. More guts than you’ve got, butterball, she retorted silently. Then she puffed out a heartfelt sigh of relief.
The Pentagon: Situation Room
“They’re definitely getting ready to launch,” said General Scheib, his eyes fixed on the wall screen that showed the latest satellite imagery from North Korea.
Zuri Coggins was speaking hurriedly, urgently, into the hair-thin headset she had attached to her minicomputer. Talking to the White House, Michael Jamil guessed. General Higgins was on his feet, his shirt rumpled, his face pasty.
Jamil wondered if the fatheaded general would send an alert to San Francisco now. The President arrives there and the North Koreans start their missile countdown. That can’t be a coincidence. It can’t be.
Then he asked himself, How did they know that the President landed? With all the commercial comm-sats out, there’s no worldwide news coverage. And we certainly aren’t sending data from our milsats to the DPRK.
They must have one or more satellites of their own watching San Francisco, Jamil concluded. Then he shook his head. The North Koreans didn’t have any satellites in space. The bomb they had launched was the first time they’ve gotten a bird into orbit successfully.
I need access, he realized. Seeing that the Coggins woman had taken off her headset and was watching the satellite imagery along with everybody else, he got out of his chair and went up the table to her.
“May I use your mini for a few minutes?” he asked.
Coggins cast a suspicious look at him, annoyed at being interrupted from her concentration on the wall screen’s imagery. The scene looked semi-weird, distorted. The surveillance satellite must be getting close to the local horizon, Jamil figured. It’ll be out of the area in a few minutes.
“My computer?” Coggins asked.
“Only for a few minutes. Please.”
She hesitated a heartbeat, then gestured to the mini. “Go ahead. It’s connected to the Defense Department’s information web.”
“Fine. Thanks.” Jamil slid into the chair next to Coggins and pulled the book-sized computer in front of him.
Coggins got up and stretched. Tense as a tightrope, she said to herself. Why not? You’ve got a lot to be tense about.
She walked over to the coffee cart. All three urns were empty again. We’re drinking too much of it anyway, she thought, even though she wished she had a cup to hold in her hands.
“Coffee’s gone again?”
Turning, she saw it was General Higgins glowering at the cart. He waved to his aide and pointed ostentatiously to the stainless steel urns. “I’ve got to tell him everything,” Higgins complained.
Coggins half-whispered, “Do you think they’re really targeting the President?”
The general shook his head stubbornly. “Scheib says those missiles don’t have the range or accuracy to hit San Francisco. He’s our local expert.”
“Then it’s Honolulu.”
“Or Fairbanks. Or Manila. Or Shanghai.” Higgins looked back at the screen, muttering, “Our next recon bird won’t be over the area for another ten minutes.”
She stepped across the room to where General Scheib stood staring at the wall screen while he gnawed his lip.
“How soon before they launch?” Coggins asked.
Scheib cocked his head to one side, thinking. Then he replied, “No more than an hour. Ninety minutes on the outside.”
“Can they hit San Francisco?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But if that’s their target, can your people stop them?”
General Scheib looked down at her. He still wore his tunic, ribbons displayed across his chest. Except for a shadow of beard, he looked almost as sharp as he had in the morning, when the group first convened. But he was gnawing his lip.
“Wherever they’re aiming for, we’ve got four Aegis ships in the Pacific and our land-based antimissile batteries in Alaska and California.”
“Can they shoot the missiles down?”
He started to shake his head, caught himself. “You have to understand the problem. Once those ballistic missiles’ rocket engines burn out, they’re on a coasting trajectory to their target.”
“So you can track exactly where they’re heading,” Coggins said.
“Yeah, but they separate the warhead from the body of the missile, release decoys if they’re carrying any, even break up the missile’s tankage to make a cloud of images, confuse our radar. Our guys have to pick out the warhead from that cloud of crap.”
“Can you do it?”
“It’s not easy. The best way to discriminate the warhead is when the stuff reenters the atmosphere. Air drag slows down the decoys and fragments; they’re lighter than the warhead. Then we can pick out which incoming body is carrying the bomb.”
“When it’s diving onto the target? How much time do you have to decide which is which?”
Scheib made a sound that could have been a snort. “A minute, if we’re lucky.”
Coggins felt her eyes widen. “One minute or less? Can you hit the warhead in that time span?”
“We’ve done it in tests,” Scheib said. Then he added, “About half the time.”
“Saints and sinners!” Coggins exclaimed. “Half the time?”
“That’s why ABL-1’s so important,” said the general. “If we can hit the missiles with that laser while they’re still boosting, while their rockets are burning, before they deploy their warheads and decoys…”
Coggins saw the uncertainty on his face. “Does the President know all this?”
“He’s been briefed. More than once. I made the presentation myself last year when they were considering the budget for MDA.”
He’s toast, Coggins thought. If those missiles reach San Francisco the President is toast. Along with half a million other people.
Back at the conference table, Michael Jamil had finally found the information he wanted. He had tried to check through official Defense Department files but found them too slow and cumbersome for his purposes. All DoD’s security regulations do is slow down access to the information you need, Jamil complained silently. So he’d turned to the Internet site of Aviation Week magazine. He’d heard guys at Langley call it Aviation Leak because it often published information that Washington would have preferred to keep away from the public.
And there it was, in last week’s issue. The People’s Republic of China had launched a quartet of scientific research satellites into polar orbits. Beijing announced that the satellites were part of China’s expanding space exploration program.
Space exploration my pimpled ass, Jamil snarled to himself. Those are surveillance satellites. Hardened birds, so they wouldn’t be knocked out by the nuke the North Koreans set off. They pass over California every half hour. They’re watching San Francisco and feeding the info to the North Koreans, telling them when to launch their missiles so they’ll catch the President.
Jamil pushed his chair away from the table and looked for Zuri Coggins in the group clustered before the wall screens.
The Chinese are behind this! He was certain. The North Koreans are fronting for Beijing. We’re heading smack into a nuclear war.
U.S. Route 12, Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho
Charley Ingersoll had to make a decision. The van was stuck in the god-dratted snowbank on the shoulder of the road. The more he tried to pull out of the snow, the deeper his tires spun into the ruts they were making.
Martha was ashen-faced, barely keeping herself from sobbing. The kids seemed okay, but they were strangely quiet. Scared, Charley thought.
I’m scared too, he realized. Stuck here in the middle of infernal nowhere with the snow coming down harder than ever and the van running out of gas. Stupid phone doesn’t work and there hasn’t been a snowplow through here for God knows how long. Lord have mercy! We could freeze to death! He tried the radio. Nothing but hillbilly music or blaring rock that made him feel as if his eardrums were about to explode. No news. No weather reports.
“It’s ten minutes to two, Charley,” his wife said, her voice small, frightened. “They’ll have news and weather on the hour.”
Like that’s going to do us any good, Charley thought. But he didn’t say anything out loud. He sat and waited. The van was eerily silent. Only the soft purr of the engine and the moaning wind outside. The snow was coming down heavier than ever.
How long will the gas last? Charley asked himself. Once it runs out and the heater goes, we could all freeze to death.
“Can’t we go out and make a snowman?” Little Martha asked again.
“No!” Martha snapped. “Stay in here, where it’s warm.”
For how long? Charley wondered.
“Your headlines on the hour,” a man’s deep voice intoned over a blare of trumpets. “Surprise blizzard blankets the region with snow! Widespread electric outages reported! Network and cable television still out of service!” He sounded positively happy about it all. “And now the details.”
Charley listened in growing impatience as the voice told how television service had been out all day except for local stations. Come on with the weather, Charley prompted silently. Come on!
“A surprise autumn storm has struck the region with more than a foot of snow, and still more on the way.” The guy sounded overjoyed about it, Charley thought. “Snowplow crews have been struggling to keep the interstates open, but secondary roads have been officially closed to all but emergency traffic . . .”
“Secondary roads?” Martha asked. “Are we on a secondary road?”
Charley shook his head. “Damned if I know.”
Martha glared at his language. Charley was surprised at himself. He glanced back at the kids.
“I’m cold,” Little Martha said from the backseat.
“I’ll turn up the heat, dear,” said Martha. Charley saw that the heater was already on maximum.
Suddenly he heard himself say, “We passed a gas station a couple miles back.”
“But they couldn’t pump any gas,” his wife said.
“Yeah, but I think I saw a tow truck there. They could pull us out of this snowbank and siphon some gas into our tank.”
“But we don’t have their phone nu—” Martha stopped herself, realizing that their cell phone wasn’t working anyway.
“I’ll go back and get them,” Charley said.
Martha’s eyes popped. “Outside? In this blizzard?”
“It’s only a couple miles. I can make it.”
“Charley, no! Don’t!”
But he had made up his mind while he was speaking the words. Anything would be better than sitting here doing nothing. Even freezing out in the snow.
“Charley, please! Don’t leave us!”
As he reached for the door handle, Charley said, “I’ll be back in an hour or so. With a tow truck.” He tried to sound confident. He certainly didn’t feel it.
ABL-1: Beam Management Compartment
“Got it!” Monk said, grinning.
Leaning over his burly shoulder, Harry saw the return blip from the ranging laser on the readout screen of Delany’s console. Numbers rastered down the screen’s side. The laser was working fine and pinging the tanker plane with low-power invisible infrared pulses.
Harry grabbed the headset hooked to the console’s side and slapped it onto his head. Thumbing the intercom button on the console, he called, “Hartunian to the communications officer.”
“Comm here,” said O’Banion’s voice in the earphone.
“I’m piping our ranging laser’s data to you. Please confirm against your radar.”
“Will do, Mr. Hartunian.”
Monk looked up at Harry, his lopsided grin almost a smirk. “I told you I’d get it working. No sweat.”
Harry nodded absently. It was one thing to put the little laser together and make it work. It was another to make it work right. Using the tanker plane as a target was a good test, although the plane was practically in their laps and the real test would come when they had to get the range on a missile boosting from a hundred or more miles away. But if their laser results matched the plane’s regular radar—
“Mr. Hartunian,” said O’Banion.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sending our numbers down to you. They look good to me, sir.”
“Okay, okay.” Harry felt his hands trembling slightly as the radar numbers began to appear on Monk’s screen, alongside the numbers from their ranging laser.
“On the button!” Monk crowed. “Look at that!”
Harry saw that the numbers differed only on the fourth decimal place. Good enough, he thought. Good enough.
“You’re right, Monk,” he said, forcing a smile. “We’re in business.”
“Better tell that flygirl skipper, pal.”
“I will,” Harry said, straightening up. “After I check with Taki.”
Monk’s grin shrank as Harry left him and ducked through the hatch to the battle management station, where Nakamura sat peering intently at one of the four consoles.
Sliding into the chair beside her, Harry said, “Monk got the ranger working.”
“I can see that,” Taki said, tapping a lacquered fingernail against the console’s main screen.
“Is it good enough for you?” he asked.
Nakamura nodded, but Harry saw that her lips were pressed together tightly.
“Problem?”
She looked away from him for a moment, then turned back to the console and its array of screens. “Harry, I can’t do this. Not all by myself.”
“I know.”
As if she hadn’t heard him, she went on. “I mean, it’s one thing to run a test, just fire the COIL at a spot in the empty air. But now we’re going to try to hit real missiles? Come on, there’s supposed to be four people at these consoles. I’m only one person. I can’t do everything.”
“I’ll be beside you, Taki. I’ll be right here with you. We’ll do it together.”
Nakamura focused her dark eyes on Harry. He saw doubt in them. And he understood what was going on in her head. It all depends on her, Harry thought. Wally and Angel can fire the COIL. Monk can make the ranging laser work. But it’s Taki’s responsibility to run the sensors that acquire the infrared signature of the rocket exhaust plume, point the COIL at the target, and get off enough shots to take out the missile before its engines cut off and we lose the infrared signal from the plume.
“Taki,” he said softly, “what it takes four blue-suiters to do, the two of us can do.”
“You think so?”
“Sure. You’ll get an
Annie Oakley medal for sharp-shooting.”
Her brows knit. “Annie Oakley? Who’s she?”
The tension broke and Harry laughed. “I’ll tell you all about her after this is over.”
As he got to his feet, Monk came through the hatch and passed through the compartment. “Kidney break,” Delany said.
The lens assembly! Harry thought. He’s going to wipe down the lens assembly! He watched Delany duck through the hatch, wondering what he should do.
“I’ve got to talk to the pilot,” he said to Nakamura, and followed Delany out of the compartment.
Instead of going upstairs to the flight deck, though, Harry watched Delany step into the lavatory, then he went into the galley, sat tensely at one of the bucket seats, and kept his eyes on the lav hatch.
Delany came out in less than a minute. He didn’t have time to do anything with the lens assembly, Harry thought. Hell, he didn’t even take the time to wash his hands!
But Harry entered the lavatory anyway, kneeled down, and opened the cabinet. The cartons of toilet paper were stacked just as he had left them. Taking the top few out, Harry saw the lens assembly still sitting behind them.
As he put the packages back Harry thought that so far he had proven nothing. As a detective he was a total flop.
ABL-1: Cockpit
“Message incoming from the Pentagon,” O’Banion reported. “I’m running it through decrypt now.”
“Let me see it as soon as decrypt’s finished,” Colonel Christopher said.
“Right.”
Lieutenant Sharmon’s softer voice sounded in her earphone. “We’re approaching North Korean territorial waters, Colonel.”
Karen Christopher frowned slightly. They had flown past the storm swirling across the Sea of Japan and were now over open water. Through the windscreen Christopher could see nothing but empty ocean, gray and rippled with waves. No sign of land.
“We’re twelve miles off the coast of Korea?”
“No, ma’am,” Sharmon replied. “The North Koreans claim territorial rights out to two hundred miles.”
