Ben Bova: Able One

Pete Quintana was enveloped in the flames, screaming, gibbering, flailing in agony. Harry tried to reach out to him but his own pain was so intense that he blacked out.

“Rise and shine, Harry!”

Hartunian blinked awake. The room was dark, but somebody was flicking a flashlight beam in his eyes.

Harry was drenched with sweat, gasping for breath.

“You were yelling in your sleep, pal.” Monk Delany. Harry recognized his voice and dimly made out the outline of his heavy, bearlike body in the darkness of the strange bedroom. Elmendorf Air Force Base, Harry remembered. We’re in Alaska.

“C’mon, buddy, we’re gonna miss breakfast if you don’t get going.”

Harry didn’t mind the flashlight glaring in his eyes. It was Monk’s chipper, cheerful tone that irked him. Can’t be more than four o’clock in the friggin’ morning, Harry thought, and Monk’s as jolly as a goddamned Santa Claus.

“Come on, Harry,” Delany coaxed, flicking the flashlight beam back and forth across Harry’s face again. “Rise and shine.”

“Go ‘way!”

Delany laughed. “You gotta get up, Harry. Time’s a-wasting.”

With a groan, Harry sat up, blinking, rubbing his stubbled jaw. Reluctantly he switched on the bedside lamp.

“What time is it?”

“Nearly six.”

Squinting at the room’s only window, Hartunian said, “Christ, it’s still dark.”

“Alaska, buddy. We’re not in sunny California anymore.”

“Tell me about it.”

Hartunian swung his legs out of the bed and stood up, shivering slightly in his boxers and undershirt. His back ached dully. He was a short, round-shouldered man with baby-fine thin dark hair that flew into disarray at the slightest puff of breeze. His midsection showed a distinct middle-aged bulge. He hadn’t come to Alaska willingly.

You’re the program engineer now, Harry, Victor Anson had told him. Wherever that plane goes, you go. We need you to make that damned laser work. Harry. Forget the accident. Just make it work. The company’s ass is on the line. We’re all depending on you.

“Okay,” he said to Delany, “I’m up. Go on down to the restaurant—”

“Mess hall,” Delany corrected.

“Whatever. I’ll meet you down there in ten minutes.”

Delany was several inches taller than Hartunian and outweighed him by more than thirty pounds. His hair was dark and thick, but despite his formidable appearance his normal facial expression was a genial, lopsided smile. He was already dressed in his white coveralls with the Anson Aerospace Corporation logo on its chest and back.

“You know how to find the mess hall?”

“I’ll find it,” Harry said, reaching for his bathrobe.

“Ten minutes.” Delany went to the door. He turned back, though, and advised, “Wear the heavy coat. October out here can be pretty damned chilly.”

“Where’s your coat?”

Delany flashed a grin. “I never feel the cold.”

Blubber, Harry thought sourly.

It was cold outside, he discovered. Cold and still dark, although the sky was lightening enough in the east to silhouette the rugged snowcapped mountains. Despite his brand-new goose-down-lined parka Harry’s back twinged from the cold. Psychosomatic, the doctors had claimed. Your ribs have healed and there’s nothing wrong with your spine. Still, ever since the accident, Harry’s back ached.

If I’d stayed in California like a sane man, Harry thought, I could’ve gone to the beach today.

Yeah, a sardonic voice in his head replied. And you’d have Sylvia and her lawyers pounding on your door, trying to get you to sign the damned divorce papers.

With a shake of his head, Harry looked around for the mess hall. He’d arrived at Elmendorf Air Force Base the previous afternoon, and most of the buildings in the sprawling facility looked pretty much alike to him. Last night, though, before going to sleep in the room they’d assigned him and Delany to share in the Bachelor Officers quarters, Harry had checked the route from the BOQ to the mess hall and put it into his cell phone’s memory. Now he pulled the phone from his pants pocket to orient himself.

Damn! The phone was dead. No, he saw, it was getting power from the battery. But the screen said NO CONNECTION.

Harry looked up. A young airman was walking along the bricked pathway toward him.

“Hey . . . Sergeant,” Harry said, noting the stripes on his jacket sleeve.

“Can I help you, sir?”

Feeling sheepish, Hartunian admitted, “I’m kind of lost.”

The sergeant directed him down the street one block and then to the first right. “You can’t miss it,” he added cheerily.

Harry, who had been raised in the tangled suburbs of Boston, thought of all the “you can’t miss it” locations he’d missed. But he went to the corner and turned right.

And there was the mess hall, with dozens of men and women streaming into it. Most of them in uniform.

But what caught his attention was down at the end of the street, where a little Day-Glo orange tractor was towing ABL-1 out of its hangar. Harry gaped. The sight of the big 747, all white, never failed to awe him. It was an immense airplane with that graceful hump up front and the huge raked-back tail towering over the other planes parked in front of the hangars. Somehow she looked dignified to Harry, regal, like royalty as she grandly allowed herself to be slowly rolled out onto the tarmac.

Make it work, Harry, Victor Anson had told him. The company’s ass is on the line.

Jerry Jarusulski frowned as he sat at the controls of the Airbus A350 XWB. Halfway between Hawaii and California, he grumbled to himself, and the nav system craps out.

Through the cockpit’s windshield he could see nothing but cloud-dotted ocean, steely gray and rippled with waves. Not a ship in sight. No land for another thousand klicks or more. “Anything?” he asked his copilot. “Not a peep, JJ,” said Pete Jacobson. “Every damned freak is out. I’m getting some commercial stations, L.A. and ‘Frisco. But all the air control frequencies are off.”

“What the hell’s happened to them?” “Something weird,” the copilot said. “Well, we’ll reach the California coast in another couple of hours. We can go to VFR then.”

Jacobson nodded, but he looked doubtful. Jarusulski shared his worries. Flying a big-ass jet airliner on visual wasn’t going to be easy, he knew. Always a helluva lot of traffic at LAX. And the last weather report they got predicted rain. Those guys in the tower better have their systems working if they expect me to bring this bird down. What a time for the navigation satellite system to go kablooey.

Jacobson started chuckling softly.

“What’s so goddamned funny?” Jarusulski growled.

“It’s like that old joke, the one about good news and bad news.”

Yeah?

“You know. The pilot gets on the intercom and tells the passengers, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that we’re lost. I don’t know where the hell we are. The good news is we’ve got a tail wind and we’re making good time.’ ”

Jarusulski didn’t laugh. He was thinking about trying to land this jumbo bird in the rain. LAX better have its comm systems working, he said to himself. If they don’t, we’re toast. Burnt toast.

The Oval Office was crowded.

Hunching forward in the padded chair behind his gleaming broad desk, the President muttered, “From North Korea,” his lean face bleak, his voice ominous.

In a shallow semicircle in front of the desk sat the Secretaries of Defense and State, the National Security Advisor, the director of Homeland Security and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Off to one side of the room the President’s chief of staff sat on one of the striped sofas in front of the empty fireplace, his hands clasped tensely on his knees. Half a dozen aides were back there, too.