Ben Bova - Able One

The Security Advisor wasn’t accustomed to making snap decisions. All his life he’d waited until all the available information was in his hands before putting his reputation on the line.

But he said, “I’ll put in another call to Air Force One. You know, he’s not going to like this.”

“Better fled than dead,” Coggins said with a grim smile.

When she came back into the situation room, the group had again broken into separate little knots of people, except for General Scheib, who sat at his place with a plug in one ear, tapping furiously at his laptop keyboard. And Jamil, who still sat alone at the end of the table. Maybe somebody put glue on his chair, Coggins thought.

General Higgins called to her from the front of the stuffy room. “Well? What happened?”

“He’s calling Air Force One and urging the President to turn back.”

Higgins nodded. “Okay. That’s done. Now we sit and wait.”

Slowly, everyone returned to their seats. Turning to General Scheib, Higgins asked, “Did you get the fighter cover you want?”

His face like a thundercloud, Scheib said, “They’re bucking the request to SecDef.”

“The Secretary of Defense?” Higgins frowned. “He’s a civilian.”

Coggins didn’t know whether to laugh or growl.

General Scheib said, “Nobody wants to take the responsibility.”

“Hell, I’ve already taken the responsibility,” said General Higgins. “Did you tell them I approved the request?”

“I did. They’re bucking it up the chain of command.”

“To a politician,” Higgins grumbled. “And he’ll just buck it up to the Commander in Chief.”

Scheib looked disgusted. “They’d better make the decision pretty damned quick. If the North Koreans send interceptors after ABL-1, that’s plane’s dead meat.”

“You’ve done as much as you can, Brad. Now it’s up to the politicians.” Higgins turned to the admiral sitting across from Coggins and asked, “Has Honolulu been alerted?”

Nodding, the admiral replied, “Emergency teams are being notified. We’re telling them this is a surprise drill.”

“You’re not letting them know that they may be attacked?” Coggins asked.

“And start a panic?” the admiral snapped. “More people would be killed in the stampede to get out of the city than if the city really was nuked.”

Coggins saw that Jamil slowly shook his head. He knows better, she thought. He knows that if they nuke Honolulu a couple of hundred thousand people will be killed instantly. At least.

Higgins turned the discussion to emergency rescue tactics. Coggins opened her minicomputer and, looking toward Higgins all the time, reopened Jamil’s file.

He’s a Christian, she saw with a quick flick of her eyes to the tiny screen. His whole family is Christian. That must be why they fled Lebanon and came here. And Higgins thinks he’s an Arab. She smiled to herself. She wondered what General Higgins would think if he knew that Zuri Coggins was a Black Muslim.

Linda Suwazi saw her career going down in flames. The baby’s due in four months, she groaned inwardly, and this is gonna get me laid off, for sure.

Sitting in front of Linda’s desk, Mrs. Markley radiated cold fury. “You are the branch manager, aren’t you? Why can’t you get the machines fixed?”

Mrs. Markley was the seventh customer to barge into her office in the past half hour, complaining that the ATMs were down. Linda had tried to phone the local service company, but she’d gotten nothing but a busy signal. In desperation she had called corporate headquarters in Houston. No use. The line was so jammed with other calls that all she got was an automated message advising her to call again later.

“I want access to my money!” Mrs. Markley was hissing. “It’s bad enough that your machines aren’t working, but your tellers refuse to cash my Social Security check!”

“Our computers are down,” Linda tried to explain. “It’s only temporary, I’m sure. If you could come back later…”

Mrs. Markley rose grandly to her feet, practically twitching with rage. She reminded Linda of a beady-eyed rat.

“If you can’t run your bank properly you should be replaced!” Mrs. Markley snapped. Then she swept out of Linda’s office.

Linda sank back in her swivel chair and fought down the urge to burst into tears.

“You scared, boss?”

Startled, Harry half-turned and saw Delany’s big, bearlike form lumbering up the narrow walkway toward him. Harry had slowly worked his way past the lasing cavity and mixing chamber, heading tailward along the tanks that held the liquid oxygen and iodine toward the cramped little monitoring station where Wally Rosenberg sat, checking pressures and tankage levels.

“What are you doing back here?” Harry demanded. Monk’s station was up in the nose, at the beam control compartment.

“The optics are all okay,” said Delany. “I was just wondering how you guys’re feeling. You nervous about this?”

“Nervous? Kind of,” Harry admitted. “Aren’t you?”

Delany shrugged. “Why should I be nervous? The gooks are about to start World War III and we’re in the middle of the action. What’s there to be nervous about?”

Harry wanted to laugh, but the best he could do was to crack a thin smile.

“You checked the optics?” he asked Delany. “Everything’s on the tick. No problems.” “Where’s Taki?”

“Up at the battle management console, where she should be. Maybe they’ll give her an Air Force commission if she nails those gook missiles.”

Harry knew that he and the other civilians were manning the laser only because this was supposed to be a test flight. We’re only a skeleton crew at best, he thought. When the system’s declared operational, Air Force personnel will take over. With more than twice the number of their five-person team, at that.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go up forward and see how she’s making out.”

Delany gave him that sloppy salute of his. “Aye, aye, skipper.”

Harry shook his head. “This isn’t the Navy, Monk.”

“We ain’t the Air Force, either.”

The COIL’s channel ran through the length of the plane, past the crew compartment and galley, beneath the flight deck and cockpit, and into the bulbous turret that made the plane’s nose look like a potato. Taki Nakamura’s station was up forward, at the electronics consoles that monitored the plane’s sensors and the laser’s output beam.

Taki’s battle management compartment was directly beneath the flight deck. Harry scanned the row of consoles, most of them dark and unused until they powered up the laser. The plane’s slight swaying was more noticeable up here near the nose. Like a ship at sea, Harry thought. This big lunk of an airplane must weigh a hundred tons, but it still pitches up and down a little.

Nakamura was sitting at the main console, her fingers flicking across the keyboard, her eyes focused intently on the display screen.

“Everything okay, Taki?” asked Harry.

She looked up at him, her lean, sculpted face utterly serious. “Everything’s in the green, jefe.”

Harry nodded to her. He remembered that Pete Quintana was the guy they originally called el jefe, the boss. Harry inherited the title when Anson put him in charge of the team, after Pete was killed. An gel Reyes had even gotten his wife to stitch the title onto some of Harry’s T-shirts and coveralls. Victor Anson had never seen it, thank god. There was only one god in heaven, Anson always said, and one head of Anson Aerospace. Yet Anson had never come out to the desert to see the test rig, never even made his way down to the working section of his own company’s laboratory in Pasadena. He stayed in his office. People came to him.