Ben Bova - Able One

Not that it did her any good. They couldn’t get Brad’s name out of her, so they bounced her out of her job with the B-2 squadron and stuck her in a dumbbell assignment driving a cargo plane on milk runs.

But the cargo plane turned out to be ABL-1. Nobody expected the plane to do anything but fly racetrack courses over the open ocean and shoot its laser at simulated targets. Nobody expected the North Koreans to start World War III or ABL-1 to be sent on this mission to stop the war before it started. Nobody expected Lieutenant Colonel Karen Christopher to be placed at the pivotal point of world history.

“Uh, Colonel, ma’am?”

Karen snapped her eyes open. Lieutenant Sharmon was standing over her, looking a little embarrassed.

She pushed herself up to a sitting position. “What is it, Jon?”

“I’ve got the numbers on how long we can stooge around waiting for the tanker. They don’t look good.”

Out of the corner of his eye Charley Ingersoll noticed the gas gauge’s warning light flicker. The highway was blanketed with snow now; the clouds were low and dark. We ought to be outrunning this dratted storm, Charley fumed to himself, but instead it’s just getting worse. He wished he’d put in new wiper blades before starting on this stupid trip; the wipers were smearing his windshield so badly he could hardly see outside.

They’d stopped at two more gas stations, but both of them had no electricity, either, so they couldn’t pump gas. We’re not going to make it home unless we can fill the ever-loving tank, Charley knew.

The warning light glowed steadily now, a little yellow eye that told Charley he was in real trouble. What to do? What to do? Push on until we run out of gas or pull over and keep the car heated until a snowplow comes by?

Martha was still fiddling with the radio, trying to get a local station.

“Try the cell phone again,” Charley said. His wife shook her head. “It doesn’t work. I’ve tried it a dozen times and it doesn’t work.”

“Try it again, dammit!”

She looked shocked at his language, but picked the cell phone off the console between their seats and pecked at it.

“Nothing,” she said, almost as if she were happy about it.

At least the kids were quiet in the backseat. They’d peed and eaten a couple of granola bars. That ought to keep them satisfied for a while, Charley thought.

“Stay in the middle!” Martha yelped as Charley maneuvered the van around a curve. There was no guardrail and she was on the open side. The snow was so thick now that Charley couldn’t see how far a drop it was on her side.

“I’m only doing forty,” he growled. He didn’t tell her that the road felt slick, slippery in spots.

The radio crackled with the distant voice of a sportscaster reporting that the Seattle Seahawks expected to have perfect football weather for Sunday’s game against the San Diego Chargers.

Big fornicating deal, Charley grumbled to himself.

At least a snowplow had been through this stretch of highway, Charley realized. There was less than an inch of snow on the roadway. Good, he thought, leaning a little more heavily on the accelerator. Fifty miles an hour. That’s better than—

There was ice under the coating of snow and the van suddenly spun a full circle before Charley could do anything about it. Martha screamed and the kids yelled. The van smacked sideways into a mound of snow on the shoulder of the road, with Charley jamming both his feet on the brake.

Charley could feel his heart hammering beneath his ribs. Martha was sobbing. Glancing over his shoulder Charley saw that both the kids seemed okay. White-faced and wide-eyed, but unhurt. Their seat belts had kept them from being banged around.

“You okay back there?” he asked, surprised at how his voice shook.

“Yessir,” said Charley Jr. “I think so.”

“Me too,” Little Martha echoed.

“How about you?” Charley asked his wife.

“My chest hurts.”

“The seat belt must have caught you.”

“I think I’m having a heart attack.”

“You’re not having a heart attack. It’s just the seat belt. I bet I’m bruised too.”

From the backseat Little Martha piped up. “Can we go outside and make a snowman?”

Major Joseph E. Dugan, USAF, had learned one vitally important thing in his military career: when you need a job done, and done right the first time, get an experienced noncom to do it.

He stood in a lightly misting rain in front of the hangar closest to the flight line and watched befuddled maintenance crews towing planes out into the drizzle and parking them helter-skelter across the apron.

Standing beside him was Technical Sergeant Aaron “Scrap Iron” Clinton, hard-eyed and humorless, his skin as dark as an eggplant, fists planted on the hips of his rumpled fatigues, an unlit cigar clamped in his teeth. The “seegar,” as Clinton called them, was Clinton’s hallmark. He never smoked them. He chewed them.

When Joe Dugan’s old friend and senior major, Hank Wilson, had commanded him to have the incoming KC-135 refitted with a replacement engine in one hour or less after its landing, Dugan fell back on his crucial piece of military wisdom. He sprinted over to the base maintenance center and hollered for Sergeant Clinton.

“Sergeant,” he bellowed, “there’s a KC-135 tanker due in here in twenty minutes. It’s got to have an engine replaced and be back in the air in one hour.”

Sergeant Clinton had been through a lot in his Air Force career. Twice he had been broken down to airman for getting caught with his pants down in married women’s bedrooms. Three times he had been offered a chance for a commission—and refused.

“I ain’t officer material,” he had insisted in his stubborn Arkansas drawl. “I work for a livin’.”

Now this white major was demanding the impossible. Clinton saluted and said, around his unlit cigar, “One hour. Yes, sir!”

That was why, as the ailing KC-135 taxied right into the hangar that had been emptied for it, its pilot stared goggle-eyed at the small army of technicians in Air Force fatigues who swarmed around the plane even while its engines were wheezing to a stop.

“Holy shit!” the pilot exclaimed. “It looks like a pit crew from the Indianapolis 500 out there!”

“Colonel, I’ve got the fuel bingo calculated.” Karen Christopher nodded as she sat at the controls of ABL-1. “Plug it into the flight plan, Jon,” she said to her navigator.

Shannon’s voice in her headphone sounded reluctant. “I don’t have really good numbers for wind velocities, Colonel. With the satellites down and all...”

“Give me three estimates,” said Colonel Christopher. “Best case, worst case, and the average between them.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

In a few minutes numbers began to flicker on the control panel’s central display screen. Christopher watched them scroll by, then they steadied and held still.

In the right-hand seat, Major Kaufman grunted, glanced at the panel’s digital clock, then checked his wristwatch. “Thirty-eight minutes. Then we gotta turn back for Misawa.”

“That’s the worst case,” the colonel said. “If the winds don’t buck us too hard we can stretch it another ten, fifteen minutes.”

Kaufman said nothing, but the look on his face told Christopher what he thought of stretching their luck. She gave him a faint smile. “Think we should put on our life vests, Obie, just in case?”

“That ain’t funny,” Kaufman muttered.

Christopher tapped the side of her helmet where the headphone was built in and called, “Brick, anything from Misawa about our tanker?”