Ben Bova - Able One

“Jesus Christ!” Kaufman bellowed.

“We’ve been hit!” Christopher grabbed at the controls, but the 747 was sliding into a shallow dive, bucking like a wild horse, its left inboard engine nacelle shredded and aflame.

“Fire extinguishers, Obie!”

Kaufman, staring goggle-eyed at the flames streaming from where the engine nacelle had been, shuddered for a heartbeat, then slammed the fire extinguisher system’s number two button almost hard enough to punch through the control panel.

“Pull her up!” he yelled as he reached for the control yoke in front of him.

“Trying . ..” Christopher panted, pulling with all her strength on the unyielding yoke. The big plane was shaking so hard her helmet was jiggling on her head, nearly slipping over her eyes.

In the battle management compartment Harry was almost slammed off his seat. The safety harness cut into his shoulders painfully.

“What the hell was that?” Nakamura yelped.

“We’re going down!” he realized.

Rosenberg’s voice screamed in his headphone, high-pitched, scared, “What the fuck’s happening up there?”

We’re dead, Harry replied silently. We’re all dead. The plane was jolting and rattling so hard Harry thought it would fall apart any second.

Then Taki pointed a shaking finger at the radar screen. “They’ve launched the other missile!”

Christopher’s mind went strangely calm. One engine out, losing altitude. Altimeter spinning down like it’s on steroids. Glancing out her left window she saw that the fire was out. At least there weren’t any flames streaming from beneath the wing. She saw ugly gashes in the wing’s surface where pieces of the exploded engine had ripped through. A long slick of fuel from a ruptured tank glistened across the shredded wing’s top. At least it wasn’t on fire.

“Close off that tank,” she said to Kaufman. “Shift to the tanks that haven’t been punctured.”

Automatically, she powered down a little, her right hand easing back slightly on the master throttle. Plane flies okay on three engines, she told herself.

We can fly fine on three. Then a sour voice in her head asked, So why’d they put the fourth engine on her?

Automatically, she swiftly scanned the control panel. Pressurization’s holding okay, she saw. No shrapnel’s penetrated the fuselage. Not the pressurized sections, anyway.

Level off, she told herself. Get her level. The plane was still shaking, rattling, but not as badly as before, responding to the controls now. She shot a quick look at Kaufman. He had both hands locked on his control yoke, knuckles white, face whiter. The 747 was leveling out, the altimeter still winding down, but slower now. Shit, Christopher said to herself, we’ve only lost a couple thousand feet of altitude.

“Leveling out,” Kaufman said, his voice shaky.

“Yeah.”

“Colonel, they’ve launched the other missile!” Hartunian called.

Christopher bit back the reply that leaped into her mind: Listen, buddy, we’ve got enough to do just staying in the air now. Never mind your goddamned missiles.

Instead, she looked out the windshield and saw the bright plume streaking upward from the distant horizon.

“Point us at it!” Hartunian urged.

“We’ve been hit,” she said, as calmly as she could manage.

As if he hadn’t heard her, Hartunian demanded, “Get the nose up and point her toward that plume. Now! We’ve got less than a minute!”

She looked at Kaufman. “Let’s do what the man says, Obie. Get the nose up.”

“If we can.”

Grimly, Christopher tugged on her control yoke. The lumbering 747 responded slowly, grudgingly. But her nose went up slightly.

“We’re bouncing in and out of acquisition,” Nakamura shouted.

Harry felt the plane shaking, shuddering, and wondered how long she would hold together. The screens on his consoles were jittering in front of his eyes.

“Get him, Taki,” he said, growling. “You’ve got thirty seconds, maybe less.”

“Acquiring,” Nakamura said, her voice edging higher. “If they could just hold the plane steady . . .”

Harry saw the yellow line of the missile’s trajectory rising toward the top of his screen. In another few seconds the bird would be so high they couldn’t get the COIL to point at it.

“Locked on!”

Fire the bastard, Harry urged silently. He heard the rumble from deep in the 747’s innards: the COIL was running.

“Missed!” Nakamura snapped. Before Harry could say anything she muttered, “Firing again. Multiple pulses.”

The line on Harry’s screen reached the top of the display, then winked out. “Did we get him?”

Nakamura shook her head. “I don’t know!”

In the cockpit, Kaufman yelled, “You’re going to stall out!”

Christopher didn’t reply. The tech guys needed the nose aimed at the missile and the missile was rising fast. She eased the lumbering 747’s nose up, up, hoping they had enough airspeed to avoid a stall. She’ll drop like the Rock of Gibraltar if she goes into a stall, Christopher thought. The plane was still vibrating, jouncing along on three engines and a shredded wing. Come on, baby, you can do it. Just hold it for a few seconds. A few seconds more… “Got it!” Kaufman yelped.

Another orange-red blossom of fire bloomed where the missile’s exhaust plume had been.

“We hit it!” Christopher agreed. She had a crazy impulse to lean over and plant a kiss on Kaufman’s round cheek. Instead she let the control yoke slide forward and the plane’s nose eased down.

“We did it,” Kaufman said, his voice hollow with wonder. “We shot both the bastards down.”

“We sure as hell did!”

Kaufman broke into a major-league grin.

“Let’s get this old bus back to Misawa,” said Christopher.

“If we can.”

Christopher started a right turn, away from the coast.

O’Banion called, “Oh-oh. Colonel, you better listen to this.”

“I repeat: American 747,” said a steely male voice in her headphone, “do not try to escape. You will follow us to DPRK air base and land there. Or we will shoot you down.”

Brad Scheib pressed his hand against the earbud. Karen’s voice sounded strained, tense in the tiny speaker. He saw all the others in the room staring at him and knew he couldn’t say aloud what he wanted to tell her. I got you into this mess, Karen. I didn’t know you’d be flying the plane, I didn’t know you’d be on the hot seat. Don’t get yourself killed, honey. Come back to me. Come back.

“What’s happening?” General Higgins demanded, red-faced.

“They got the first missile,” Scheib said. Higgins broke into a happy grin. Zuri Coggins murmured, “Thank God.”

Then Scheib heard “Jesus Christ!”

“We’ve been hit!” Karen’s voice.

Scheib felt the blood draining from his face.

“What is it?” Coggins asked. “What’s wrong?”

“The interceptor hit them,” Scheib said.

“Where?”

“How bad?”

“Shut up!” Scheib snapped.

He heard Karen yell, “Fire extinguishers, Obie!”

“Pull her up!”

“Trying…”

Scheib listened, sweat beading his brow, as the others in the situation room clustered around him. Even the academic from NIC got up from his chair and slowly walked up the table toward him.

“Close off that tank,” Karen shouted. “Shift to the tanks that haven’t been punctured.”

Oh my God, Scheib thought. She’s going down. They’ve shot her down.

“Leveling out.” A man’s voice. Must be the copilot.

Somebody in the room shouted, “Look! They’ve launched the other missile!”

Scheib looked up at the wall screen. The last of the three missiles was rising up from its pad on a plume of flame.