Джанет Моррис - The 40-Minute War

“Well, that makes me feel a whole lot better.”

“Good.” Beck grinned ingenuously. “That’s what I’m here for.”

“Life goes on, eh?”

“Let’s hope so, Rafic. Otherwise, this whole thing…”

Beck spread his hands and then curled them around the P-3B’s yoke so that Ashmead snapped to: the return-to-manual was on the yoke and Ashmead wasn’t entirely sure that Beck was taking this as well as he pretended: crashing a plane is the easiest thing in the world.

“…Tiebreaker, I mean,” Beck continued, “is useless. And I really don’t want to think that. It’s cost us so much already…”

“You know what Thoreau said to me just now?” Ashmead was watching Beck’s hands. “He said it’s nobody’s fault. And he’s right. It’s real natural to get solipsistic at a time like this—I’m fighting it myself. You think it’s all your fault. So does probably everybody else in positions similar to ours.”

“But if I’d countered the negatives on your report, pushed it through…” Beck’s knuckles were white and as he spoke he was staring out into the 0200 dark. “There wouldn’t have been any nuking of Home Plate, no—”

“And if I’d ignored the pull-back order,” Ashmead said wearily, “same thing. God knows I’ve done it before. But intelligence failures happen; they’re a consequence of a bureaucracy removed from the action and overly sensitized to non-operational matters: political repercussions, budgets, adverse publicity. We thought somebody else would take over, that they wanted a clean kill over the ocean with no one to blame rather than a counterterrorist operation at the Riyadh airport where, if the bomb was detonated during the action, a lot of moderate Arbas would have been very unhappy. We reacted in a politico-military context which doesn’t exist any more—all of us, you as well as me and my people. It’s easy to forget that now that we’re stuck with the consequences and the context is so radically altered.”

“Slick sure has.” Now Beck was looking at him, and Ashmead could see the results of his impromptu pep talk: Beck’s stare was bright and steady; the dull defensiveness of shock was gone; Beck was beginning to let his emotions cycle—a healthy sign.

Seeing that, Ashmead began to relax: he needed every watt of Beck’s mental power plant for what lay ahead: “Slick is… Slick. When we need him, you’re going to appreciate him. Until then, don’t take him too seriously. He always bitches when he has nothing much to do, gets depressed if he’s not in the middle of a high-risk operation or a fire fight. But under pressure, I’ve never seen anybody with as much—”

Just then Ashmead heard somebody come forward and twisted in his seat, at first seeing only Thoreau, who hadn’t brought his coffee.

“Thoreau, where’s my damned coffee? Do I have to—”

Then he saw that Thoreau was not alone; in back of the tall pilot was Morse, the fat little geneticist.

Thoreau said, “I’m sorry, Rafic, I’m really sorry, but this guy’s got a homemade bomb he says will—”

Beck didn’t even turn around; with one hand he rubbed his eyes with thumb and forefinger and with the other casually punched up the intercom.

Morse was saying, “Just shut up, pilot, if that’s what you are.” The little man’s voice was high and shaky with pent-up hostility and fear. “We’re going to change course, land in Atlanta, and find my family— now . Or I’ll blow us all to—”

“We can’t do that,” Beck said smoothly, slowly turning in his seat. “Tell him, Ashmead.”

Ashmead had been noticing that Thoreau’s sidearm wasn’t in his cross-draw holster anymore and wondering if he could risk either a shot from his own pistol, which might or might not go through Thoreau and kill Morse, or a leap at Thoreau, which might pin Morse to the deck but which would probably also end in the pilot’s death or the abrupt depressurization of the cockpit from a shot gone wild or the detonation of the bomb—most likely all three. Even if the bomb didn’t go off, and if Ashmead emerged unharmed, he doubted his ability to wrestle what would then be a rapidly crashing aircraft back onto some acceptable heading.

So he said to Morse: “Beck’s telling you the truth. We were stretching it, anyway, from Morocco to Houston. I’ve only got forty-five minutes’ worth of reserve fuel at cruising speed, and that’s not enough to get us back to Atlanta. If you’d have pulled this little stunt an hour ago, you might have had a chance. As it is, you’re just giving us a choice of ways to die, and I’d rather be blown up than crash in a red zone.” The point, he knew, was to keep Morse talking, so he added, “What kind of a bomb did you whip up, anyway? And why? We’ve been taking care of you pretty good.”

“Taking care of me?” Morse’s voice approached soprano. “Never you mind what kind of bomb I’ve got, just take my word for it, unless you’re a chemist. And I don’t believe you about the fuel, any more than I think that the way you’ve been treating me is acceptable or that you really have any intention of helping me get to my family once you’ve delivered your precious cargo to that murdering President, who’s got no right to special treatment, not on my sweat, when somewhere my wife and—”

Slick grabbed Morse in a choke hold, his elbow crooked around Morse’s throat with a force that snapped his neck back, his other hand twisting a vial from the little geneticist’s left hand, then released the choke hold in time to grab Thoreau’s gun as it fell from Morse’s limp fingers.

The geneticist slumped to the floor.

“Sometimes,” said Slick, stepping over Morse, who lay motionless, his neck at an unlikely angle, “I wonder how you guys ever got along without me.” He handed Thoreau his pistol, butt first. “Good thing the safety was on.” Then: “Whoever turned on that intercom was thinking on his feet.”

“Beck,” Ashmead said. “Let’s see the bomb.”

“Beck? No shit?” Slick grinned wolfishly as he maneuvered around the prostrate geneticist and Thoreau in the narrow confines of the flight deck and carefully handed Ashmead the vial of yellow liquid.

“He’s dead,” came Thoreau’s uninflected judgment from where he crouched over the corpse.

“I had to save your ass, didn’t I?” Slick said defensively. “Otherwise I would have had to stand there while he told me if I didn’t let go and give him back his bomb he’d shoot you.”

“No problem,” Beck told them. “We got the formula from the Israelis; even if we hadn’t, we could always analyze—”

“Piss,” said Ashmead critically, holding the vial up and shining his penlight into it. Then carefully he began to open it.

“Don’t do that,” Thoreau objected. “What if it’s air-activated?”

“I told you,” Ashmead said, “it’s piss. And there’s a half-inch of air in this bottle. He didn’t have anything, not a damned thing. Just scare tactics.”

“He had my gun,” Thoreau said sheepishly.

Slick grabbed for the vial: “Let me see that.”

Ashmead gave it to him: “Go pour it in the toilet.”

“Sure thing, Rafic,” said Slick, eyes downcast.

“And, Slick? Nice job.”

“Thanks to Beck, yeah, not bad.” Slick clapped Beck on the shoulder as he scrambled aft, muttering to Thoreau to help him get Morse back into his bunk without alarming the dips.

“Too late for that. Beck, you’d better go tell them what happened.” Ashmead glanced at the intercom control. “When did you turn that off?”

“As soon as Slick grabbed him. Don’t worry, they’ll be glad he’s dead. As far as the bomb being nonexistent, let’s not tell anybody.”