Ben Bova - Able One

Harry patted Taki’s slim shoulder and moved forward, past the battle management compartment and into the nose of the mammoth airplane. Here was the beam control station, Monk Delany’s domain, the business end of the COIL, where megawatts of infrared energy fed through the ball-shaped turret in the plane’s nose and lanced out toward the target.

The controls for the ranging laser were there, too. Perched in a housing atop the flight deck’s hump, the ranger was a smaller carbon dioxide laser that was used like a radar to fix the location of the target and feed that data to the big COIL for the kill. Slaved to the sensors that spotted the missile’s hot rocket plume, the smaller laser pinpointed the missile’s position and distance. The turret in the plane’s nose moved in response to the data from the ranging laser and then, zap! the COIL fired and the missile was destroyed.

Harry noticed that the ranging laser’s console was not powered up. Idly, he sat at the console and flicked it on. The central screen glowed to life, and the words SYSTEM MALFUNCTION burned themselves onto it.

What the hell? Harry thought. System malfunction?

“What’re you doing, Harry?”

He looked up and saw Monk Delany looming over him.

“Something’s wrong with the ranger.”

Delany leaned over his shoulder and pecked at the console’s keyboard, SYSTEM MALFUNCTION glowered at them.

“Shit,” said Delany. “You been screwing around with my program?”

“No, I just turned the console on,” Harry said.

Mumbling unhappily, Delany nudged Harry out of the seat and took over the console himself. After several moments he shrugged in frustration.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

“No kidding.” Harry knew that without the ranging laser to feed targeting information to the COIL, the whole system was useless.

“Lemme fiddle with it,” Monk said, still looking at Harry as if it were his fault.

“I’ll go check the rig,” Harry said.

“You can’t check it while we’re in the air,” Monk growled.

Harry patted his muscular shoulder. “ You can’t, ape-man. You’re too big to squeeze in there. But I’m small enough to do it.”

“You’ll break your stupid ass.”

Harry heaved a sigh and said, “It’s got to be done, Monk. Otherwise we’ll have to turn around and go home.”

Monk said nothing, but the look on his face told Harry that he wouldn’t mind returning to Elmendorf, not at all.

Harry left Monk sweating and swearing at the ranging laser console and clambered up the ladder to the flight deck. The two Air Force officers looked startled to see him.

“I need to check the laser assembly,” Harry said, pointing overhead.

The redheaded captain said, “Colonel Christopher ought to know about this, sir.”

Nodding, Harry said, “Let her know, then.” The captain spoke into his pin mike and an instant later Colonel Christopher popped through the hatch from the cockpit.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Hartunian?” She looked nettled.

“I’ve got to check the ranging laser.”

“In flight? I thought that unit was sealed off while the plane’s pressurized.”

“The laser housing is pressurized too,” Harry explained. “This won’t endanger the plane.”

She looked unconvinced. “Is this really necessary, or are you just...” She let her voice trail off, but Harry got the implication loud and clear: Are you nerds just playing around with your techie toys?

“It’s completely necessary,” he replied. “Without the ranging laser we can’t lock onto a target.”

Planting her fists on her hips, Colonel Christopher asked tightly, “Are you telling me that the ranging subsystem is down?”

“That’s right. We’re trying to find out what’s wrong with it and get it fixed.”

She stood there before him, her face set in an angry frown. Abruptly she turned to the young lieutenant and commanded, “Jon, you’re the tallest guy we’ve got. Give Mr. Hartunian all the help you can.”

Lieutenant Sharmon got up from his console, his close-cropped hair nearly brushing the overhead.

“Thank you, Colonel,” Harry said.

“Get it fixed, Mr. Hartunian.”

“Harry,” he said automatically.

Colonel Christopher looked as if she wanted to breathe fire. “Mr. Hartunian,” she repeated.

With Lieutenant Sharmon’s help, Harry unscrewed the plate that covered the ranging laser’s mount.

The tubular housing for the ranging laser was too tight for Harry to do more than stick his head through the opening. The plane’s engines sounded louder up here, the vibrations heavier. It felt cold, too. Harry realized that there was nothing between him and the subzero stratosphere out there except a thin sheathing of aluminum.

Teetering on a makeshift ladder that Sharmon had created by stripping one of the crew’s relief cots and leaning the metal frame against the bulkhead of the flight deck, Harry wormed one arm up into the shadowy housing and played the beam from his pocket flashlight down the length of the carbon dioxide laser. Everything seemed okay. No loose connections. Seals looked tight.

Turning carefully to inspect the forward end of the laser, Harry froze. The forward lens assembly was gone. Where the fist-sized unit of collimating lenses should have been there was nothing but a gaping emptiness.

Somebody’s taken the lens assembly out of the laser, Harry realized. He stared, trembling, at that empty space where the lens assembly should have been. Somebody’s taken the lens out of the laser, he repeated to himself. Without the lens assembly the ranging laser can’t work, and without the ranging laser, the big COIL can’t be aimed properly. The whole system—the whole plane—will be useless.

There’s a saboteur on the plane! The thought made Harry’s knees weak. But there was no other explanation. That lens assembly didn’t remove itself from the ranger; somebody deliberately took it out. Then he remembered the explosion at the test rig, the accident that had killed Pete Quintana and nearly broken his own back. It wasn’t an accident, Harry realized. It was deliberate sabotage. By one of my crew.

As Harry stood there, wondering what to do, how to handle this terrible new knowledge, he heard Victor Anson’s voice in his mind:

Make it work, Harry. I’m counting on you. We’re all counting on you.

Harry Hartunian had never been a fighter. He wasn’t a take-charge guy. Instead, he had a quiet, persistent, relentless determination to finish whatever he started. Born and raised in the Boston suburb of Medford, in high school Harry took a lot of ribbing for his flyaway hair and his passive, almost invisible presence in the classroom and outside. The bullies picked on him, of course, but Harry befriended the biggest guy in the school by offering to do his homework in exchange for his protection. The bullying stopped. And his bodyguard even taught Harry a few moves that were down and dirty but effective in an emergency.

He didn’t go out for sports—the mindless pressure to win turned him off. In his sophomore year Harry made the chess team, barely, but by the time he graduated he was the best chess player in the school.

Engineering appealed to him; Harry liked the idea of building things and making mechanisms work. He got a partial scholarship to Lehigh University and went into its electrical engineering program. On campus he met Sylvia Goldman, who was in the teacher’s college. She was from Media, Pennsylvania. Sylvia was attractive, buxom, with flashing dark eyes. Harry felt flabbergasted that she was interested in him.