Ben Bova - Able One

Harry had searched the galley and the compartment where he and his team sat during takeoffs and landings, knowing that whoever took the lens assembly wouldn’t stash it in such an obvious place but looking in the obvious places first. He worked his way back along the COIL’s long, bulky length, sticking his nose into every corner and cranny he saw. Nothing. Rosenberg and Angel Reyes watched him with some bemusement on their faces as Harry sniffed and peeked and ducked under the tanks that held the big laser’s fuel.

He started back, intending to check out Taki’s station. Somebody could stick the lens assembly inside one of the consoles there, or even between consoles; the assembly wasn’t much bigger than the palm of his hand.

The plane seemed to be turning again; Harry felt the sway as the lumbering jet slowly banked right. Again he wondered if he should ask Colonel Christopher what was going down, but again he decided that she probably had her hands full and didn’t need anybody pestering her. She had made it painfully clear that she regarded Harry and his team as a bunch of tech geeks. Well, he mused, that’s what we are, really. Besides, I’ve got my own job to do.

He had to urinate. The lavatory was next to the galley and Harry pushed through the accordion door. On an impulse he bent down and opened the sliding door to the compartment that held the extra toilet paper and paper towels. The boxes looked jumbled, not in a neat stack. Harry pulled a couple of them out and there was the lens assembly.

Harry squatted down and stared at it, his need to urinate forgotten. In his mind he tried to re-create the scene. Whoever yanked the assembly out of the ranging laser must have done it last night, while we were going through the preflight inspection. He knew the rest of us were in the plane and he only had a couple of minutes to hide it. He could carry it down from the flight deck and right through the battle management station, even if Taki was sitting there. She’d be focused on her console with her back to whoever was passing through the area. Besides, the assembly was small enough to hold in your hand, and even if she turned around or glanced over her shoulder she probably wouldn’t have noticed it.

Or maybe not, Harry thought. Maybe it was Taki herself.

He carefully restacked the paper goods cartons and started to leave the lavatory. Then his bladder reminded him of why he’d come into the lav in the first place.

The President stood at the forward hatch of Air Force One at the top of the stairs while the band played “Hail to the Chief” and the crowd that had gathered on the tarmac roared its greeting.

It was crisp and cool in San Francisco. Woolly gray clouds were building up along the row of hills that fronted the ocean. The President could not see either the Golden Gate or the Bay Bridge from where he stood, which disappointed him. But the familiar cadence of “Hail to the Chief” always gave him a lift.

He smiled his brightest and waved both arms over his head while a phalanx of secret service agents, most of them in dark topcoats, filtered through the crowd. His team of security technicians was setting up the portable podium down at the bottom of the stairs, with the teleprompters and blast-proof screens.

Standing beside him, the President’s chief of staff rubbed a hand over his shaved pate.

“It’s always cold in ‘Frisco,” Norman Foster complained. “Mark Twain said the coldest winter he’d ever spent was one summer in San Francisco.”

The President laughed and said, “The crowd’s nice and warm, Norm.”

Foster agreed with a vigorous nod. “That they are, Mr. President. That they are.”

The two men started down the stairs toward the knot of news reporters and photographers clustered by the portable podium, Foster a respectful two steps behind his chief.

It’s supposed to start raining in an hour or so, Foster thought. We’ll be at the Cow Palace by then. But he couldn’t help thinking that conditions would get much, much warmer if those two North Korean missiles reached the city.

Across the Bay, at the Oakland office of the National Weather Service, Sam Weathers riffled through the reports that were trickling in to his desk. Reports on paper, most of them radioed or teletyped in from weather observation posts from California to Idaho.

Weathers was a compactly built black man of forty-six, his shoulders wide and his gut still tight, thanks to weekly sessions on the basketball court at his local YMCA. He wasn’t especially tall, but he was fast and had good hands. He would flash a big toothy grin whenever he worked the ball around one of those tall, gawky giraffes and scored another basket.

He wasn’t grinning now. His desk was covered with a slowly growing glacier of papers, none of them bearing good news.

Sam had never intended to be a meteorologist. With his last name being Weathers, he thought it would be ridiculous to work for the National Weather Service. Weathers from Weather. He could hear the snickering wherever he went. So he had majored in geophysics in college, then somehow gotten interested in atmospheric physics as a graduate student. By the time he had earned his Ph.D., jobs in atmospheric physics were scarce. So he took a temporary position with the Weather Service in his college town, Berkeley, hoping to transfer to NOAA’s atmospheric physics section when the job market loosened up. Twenty-two years later he was still with the Weather Service. Weathers from Weather.

With the satellites down and phone service jammed up the kazoo, Sam had turned to the service’s radio system to get reports on the storm that had swept in from the ocean. Even that was hit-and-miss: radio reception was mostly poor because of the storm, and more and more stations were going off the air because of power outages.

Sam had rounded up a couple of kids who knew how to run the computer that fed the big electronic wall map. Even so, the map had large blank spaces in it. The low-pressure center of the storm had moved inland with surprising swiftness and was dumping snow in the higher elevations across the northern Rockies. A surprise autumn storm. There’ll be a white Hallowe’en, Sam thought bitterly. And that means trouble.

The last satellite data he’d received had shown the storm’s center still out over the Pacific. Then the weather satellites had gone dead and Sam felt blinded, groping in the dark, reverting back to communications systems that hadn’t been used, really, since before he’d started in college.

“How’s it look, Weather Man?” Sam’s boss still had his sense of humor.

Sam looked up from his littered desk and gave him a sour expression. “Major storm. We’ve got warnings out but a lot of the area is getting hit with blackouts. We got real troubles, Eddie.”

The boss shrugged. “Do your best, Weather Man.”

“Sure. What else?”

“The President landed at San Francisco International okay. Got in before the rain started.” “Rain?”

“Yeah. Don’t you read your own forecasts? It’s pouring cats and dogs outside.”

The boss walked off toward his office. Sam straightened up and headed for the windows, up the hall from his desk and the wall map.

Sure enough, it was raining out there. Raining hard.

For some reason that has delighted generations of cynics, the United States Department of State is headquartered in a part of the District of Columbia called Foggy Bottom. The Secretary of State’s spacious office was on the top floor of the handsome building. The Secretary had come directly to her office after her meeting in the Jefferson Hotel with her Chinese contact, Quang Chuli, still wearing her low-key gray pant suit and pearls. From her desk the Secretary could see across the Potomac River and its busy bridges to the glass-and-steel office towers of Virginia and the row upon row of white crosses lined up in military precision along the rolling green turf of Arlington National Cemetery.