Ben Bova - Able One

Taki Nakamura, the only woman in the team, made a mock scowl at Rosenberg. “You say every woman you see is hot.”

“Not you, Tiki-Taki,” Rosenberg shot back.

“You’d better not. Unless you want your nose stuffed up your butt.”

“Kung fu engineer,” Monk Delany cracked. Everybody laughed, even Rosenberg.

“Colonel Christopher?” Harry replied to Rosenberg’s question. “I just met her last night, same as you guys. I guess she’s good-looking, all right.”

“Well, you’re an eligible bachelor, aintcha?” Rosenberg said, his grin turning into a smirk.

“I’m still a married man,” Harry said. “We’re separated; we’re not divorced yet.”

Delany shook his head. “When are you gonna bite the bullet, Harry? Go through with the divorce, pal. Get on with your life.”

Harry said nothing.

Nakamura asked, “Is the colonel married?”

“Nope,” Rosenberg answered. “I Googled her. She’s in hot water with the Air Force, as a matter of fact. They caught her sleeping with a married guy—some general, no less.”

“Your kind of woman,” Delany said.

“Yeah. A slut,” added Reyes.

Harry decided the banter had gone far enough. “We’ve got work to do. Let’s get moving.”

As they carried their trays to the disposal area, Taki asked, “Did any of you see the northern lights out there? They’re spectacular!”

Delany said, “So that’s what it was! I caught a glimpse just before the sun came up. Then they faded out. I was wondering what those lights were.”

“Well, shit, we are in Alaska,” Rosenberg said.

Nakamura shook her head. “They were awful bright. Must be some big flare on the sun to work them up like that. Or something.”

Standing in front of the desk in the cubbyhole of an office that the base commander had given her, Lieutenant Colonel Karen Christopher was not in a happy mood. Bad enough to be exiled to this godforsaken dump in Alaska. Even worse to push the regular pilot of this oversized bus out of his job and into the right-hand seat. He’s already pissed off at me. Now they’ve stuck me with a navigator who’s so inexperienced he looks like a skinny high school kid who’s snuck into Air Force blues.

Her navigator, Lieutenant Eustis Sharmon, was tall, quite lean, with skin the color of dark chocolate. He was standing at attention before Colonel Christopher, who stood a full head shorter than him. Sharmon looked uncomfortable; Christopher felt grouchy.

But as she looked up at Sharmon’s young face and troubled, red-rimmed eyes, Colonel Christopher said to herself, It’s not his fault. The brass assigned him to me and he’s stuck with the job. Just like I’m stuck with driving this clunker of an airplane.

“Take it easy, Lieutenant,” she said, trying to put some warmth into it. She extended her hand. “Welcome on board.”

Sharmon loosened up a little. “Thanks, Colonel,” he mumbled.

Christopher perched on the edge of the desk and gestured to the chair against the wall. “Have a seat. Relax.”

The lieutenant settled into the chair like a carpenter’s ruler folding up, big hands on his knees.

“I bet you played basketball,” Colonel Christopher said, trying to smile.

“No, ma’am. Track. Ran the distance events.”

Her brows rose. “Marathon?”

Shannon smiled for the first time. It was a good, bright smile. “Did the marathon once. Once was enough.”

She laughed. “Well, what we’re doing here is easier than a marathon.” “Racetrack, they told me.”

Nodding. “That’s right. We take the bird out to a designated test area over the ocean, then fly a figure eight while the tech geniuses downstairs get their laser working. Piece of cake.”

But in her mind she was thinking of the missions she had flown over Afghanistan: twelve-thousand-kilometer distances, midair refuelings, full stealth mode, pinpoint delivery of smart bombs. Going from flying a B-2 to jockeying a dumbass 747 was more than a demotion, it was a humiliation.

“So there’s not much for me to do, then,” Lieutenant Sharmon said.

Christopher nodded. “Not as long as the GPS is working.”

“Whattaya mean there’s no satellite pictures?” Heydon Kalheimer demanded indignantly. He was standing in front of the studio’s blue wall, due to be on the air with the weather report in forty seconds. As usual, he had shown up at the last possible moment. The monitor screen that usually showed the National Weather Service satellite imagery was as blank as the wall. Kalheimer felt very put out.

His producer shrugged her heavy shoulders. They made quite a pair: Kalheimer was long and lanky, all arms and legs, even his head was narrow and long-jawed. He always had a slap-happy grin on his face, even when he was furious. The producer was built like a squat teddy bear, short, heavy, given to sighs of long suffering.

She sighed in her long-suffering way, then repeated, “No satellite pictures. Something’s screwed up. News reports say that all the satellites are down, malfunctioning.”

“How in hell am I supposed to do the weather without satellite graphics? What’m I supposed to do, just stand in front of the camera and look stupid?”

“That wouldn’t take much,” the producer muttered.

“What?”

Louder, she said, “You’ll have the local radar imagery and the National Weather Service’s forecast. Just read it off the monitor, like you always do.”

“That’ll take ten seconds. What do I do with the rest of my two minutes?”

“You’ll just have to wing it.” She knew that Kalheimer did not like winging it. Behind his facade of overweening self-confidence he was still as insecure as he’d been his first day in front of the cameras.

“Heads are gonna roll over this,” Kalheimer growled. “And your head’s gonna be the first one!”

“In five!” the floor manager shouted. “Four… three…”

The overhead lights turned on and Kalheimer turned to camera one, his toothy professional grin spread across his long, bony face.

“Hi there! It’s time for your up-to-the-minute weather report.”

The first meeting of this emergency action team is convened”—General Franklin P. Higgins glanced at his Breitling wristwatch— “at 11:46 a.m., 23 October.”

The situation room was in the basement of the Pentagon, in the wing that had been rebuilt after being blasted and burned by the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. It was a small room; it felt crowded, tense, even with fewer than a dozen men and women sitting around the oblong table. Almost every one of them had opened a laptop or notebook computer on the table before them.

Three of the room’s walls were floor-to-ceiling smart screens, showing various images from hardened Defense Department satellites. The ceiling was paneled with glareless lights. The seats around the highly polished table were dark leather, plush, comfortable. Each place at the table had a built-in phone jack and power plug.

General Higgins was a big, morose-looking man with a flabby-jowled face and a bulbous nose that had earned him the nickname Possum when he’d been a cadet at the Air Force Academy. Although he was presently on detached duty with the Defense Intelligence Agency, he still wore his blue uniform.

Zuri Coggins sat at the general’s right hand. She was from the White House, a member of the National Security Advisor’s staff, sent to this emergency action team as the West Wing’s representative. She was a tiny African-American woman, almost elfin, but very intense. Wearing a stylish short-skirted red jacket dress, she was the only woman in the conference room.