Ben Bova - Able One

Once in the cramped little galley, Christopher went straight to the coffee urn and poured herself a cup.

“Almost empty,” she murmured. “I’ll have to get Sharmon to make a fresh batch.”

Unable to contain himself any longer, Harry blurted, “Somebody sabotaged the ranging laser.”

“What?” Christopher’s dark eyes flashed.

“My people are fixing it, but somebody took out the optics from the ranging laser. Deliberately.”

She sagged back against the curving bulkhead, as if her legs wouldn’t hold her.

“We’ll get it fixed,” Harry said.

“It couldn’t have been any of my guys,” said the colonel. “None of them would know how.”

Harry agreed with a nod. “It’s one of my people. But I don’t know who.”

“You’re sure…?”

“It was deliberate. The lenses were in place when we did our inspection last night. When I checked ten minutes ago they were gone.”

“Shit on a shingle,” Christopher muttered.

“Somebody in my team doesn’t want this mission to go ahead,” Harry said.

“You can fix it? We can go on?”

“Yes, I’m pretty sure.”

“Pretty sure?”

“I’m not worried about fixing the lens assembly,” Harry said. “What worries me is what the guy’s going to try next.”

“He could blow this plane out of the sky!”

Strangely, Harry felt calm, unafraid. “I don’t think so. Whoever did it picked the least damaging way to shut us down. Without the ranging laser the big COIL is useless. And the saboteur is aboard this plane, riding with us. He doesn’t want to kill himself, whoever he is.”

“You keep saying ‘he.’ You have a woman on your crew. She’s Chinese or something, isn’t she?”

“Taki Nakamura,” Harry replied. “Born in Phoenix, Arizona. Her family’s been in the States since the 1920s. She’s as American as you or me.”

Christopher digested that information in silence. Then, “You’re going to have to keep your eyes wide open, mister.”

“I know. But we have another problem.”

“Another?”

“We can fix the ranging laser. But we won’t know if it’s calibrated properly unless we can try it out on a real target.”

“Explain.”

“It’s a low-power laser. We use it like radar, to get a pinpoint fix on the target’s distance and velocity. We need a live target to test it on.”

Colonel Christopher almost smiled. “That’s easy. We’re due for another refueling rendezvous in”— she glanced at her wristwatch—“another seventy-three minutes. You can ping the tanker.”

“Yeah,” Harry said. “That’ll work.”

“You’ll have the laser working by then?”

“We will,” Harry said, adding silently, Or I’ll jump overboard.

“But you’re supposed to be the intelligence officer!”

“That doesn’t mean they tell me diddly-squat. Sir.”

Major Hank Wilson held a flimsy sheet of a decoded message from Andrews Air Force Base, back in the States, in one big, hairy fist. He glared down at Captain William Koenig, long, lanky, and as lean as a beanpole. Koenig glared right back at his commanding officer.

Brandishing the flimsy, Major Wilson grumbled, “That tanker’s due in fifteen minutes and we don’t know why it’s here.”

“It’s out of Chongju, I know that much.”

“But why’s it landing here? Where’s it heading? We don’t have anything up there that needs an air-to-air refueling.”

“Washington moveth in mysterious ways,” Keonig murmured.

College boy, Wilson thought. Give ‘era a degree and they think they know everything. But when you need information from them they can’t produce anything but crap.

Seeing the anger growing on his superior’s face, Koenig said, “We know the tanker’s out of Chongju. We know it’s on special orders from Andrews, relayed out of the Pentagon.”

“We knew that two hours ago,” Wilson growled.

“Everything’s slowed to a crawl,” the captain said. “Our commsats are overloaded with traffic. Messages are coming through late.”

“But the message from that mother-loving tanker came through loud and clear, didn’t it?”

“Yessir. It came directly from the tanker itself, not relayed by a satellite.”

“So they have engine trouble.”

Koenig nodded. “It’s an old bird, a KC-135. Been in service for thirty-some years. I looked up the tail number.”

“So it needs to land here and get its engine fixed.”

“Or replaced.”

“So it’s going to be late for its rendezvous with whatever it’s supposed to be refueling.”

Koening spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Nothing we can do about that.”

“But there’s a plane out there someplace expecting to rendezvous with that mother-humping tanker and the fucker isn’t going to be there!”

“That’s the way it looks. Sir.”

“We have to tell that plane that its rendezvous is going to be late.”

“Yes, sir, we certainly do.”

“But we don’t know what plane we’re talking about! We don’t know where the bastard is! How can we communicate with it when we don’t know anything about it?”

“I’ve sent an urgent message back to Andrews, sir. It’s in their lap.”

Major Wilson’s heavy-jowled face looked like a thundercloud. “By the time Washington gets your message and acts on it, that mystery bird could be in the drink.”

Captain Koenig said nothing.

“So why don’t you find out what plane we’re talking about and where the fuck it is?”

“I’ve queried Andrews, sir. No response, so far.”

Wilson restrained himself from jumping over the desk and throttling the captain. It’s not his fault, he told himself. Think of your blood pressure. Remember you’ve got a physical coming up Monday morning. It’s not his fault.

But he growled, “You’re supposed to be the intelligence officer.”

General Scheib’s minicomputer chimed with the ding-dong melody of Big Ben. It sounded like a Munchkin version of the London clock’s sonorous tones.

Scheib hurried from the newly refilled coffee cart to his chair at the conference table. One of his aides from his office in the Pentagon was on the notebook’s miniature screen, a frown of concern etching lines between his brows.

“What’s up, Lieutenant?” Scheib asked, his own face tightening worriedly.

“Can we go to scramble, sir?” Scheib nodded. “Do it.”

The computer screen broke into a hash of colored streaks until Scheib tapped the password code on his keyboard.

The lieutenant’s worried face took form again. “Message incoming from Misawa, sir. Marked urgent.”

Misawa Air Force Base, Scheib knew. In northern Japan.

“Let’s see it.”

The lean, angular face of a captain replaced Scheib’s aide. The man looked more puzzled than concerned.

“We have a KC-135 asking for landing clearance here. They say they’re on a refueling mission but have developed engine trouble. Somebody needs to tell the plane they’re supposed to be refueling that the rendezvous is going to be late, but we have no information on what plane that might be or where it is.”

Scheib sank back in his chair. The timeline hack on the bottom of the screen showed that the message had been sent nearly two hours earlier.

He closed his eyes and suppressed the urge to rip out his aide’s intestines. Two hours to replay an urgent message to me! Scheib raged inwardly. Then he remembered that the commercial commsats were out and the military satellites were overloaded with traffic. The ABL-1 mission was classified Top Secret, Need to Know. Neither the tanker crew nor the base at Misawa knew what the hell was going on.