Able One (30 page)

“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.

He heard Karen say, “Let’s do what the man says, Obie. Get the nose up.”

“If we can.”

The satellite image of the North Korean missile launch was grainy, but everyone in the suddenly stuffy, hot situation room could see the missile climbing through a thin layer of cloud, its trajectory beginning to arc slightly, the bright trail of rocket exhaust curving as the missile rose.

“You’re going to stall out!” the copilot bawled.

Scheib’s guts clutched inside him. They’re all staring at me, as if I can make it all right, as if I can do something, say something ...

Come on, he pleaded with Karen silently. Come on.

“Got it!”

“We hit it!” she said.

“We did it!” The copilot sounded halfway delirious with triumph.

“We sure as hell did!” Karen said, her voice trembling slightly.

The wall screen showed a blossom of orange flame. Everyone cheered. The missile’s exhaust track ended in an expanding cloud of dirty gray smoke.

“They did it!” General Higgins crowed. “They shot the bastard down. Both of ‘em!”

“Karen!” Scheib called into his lip mike. “Karen, are you okay?”

Colonel Christopher heard the tension, the urgency in Brad’s voice.

What do I tell him? she asked herself. How much can I say? He must have other people around him. I can’t... She found that she had to swallow twice before she could reply, her throat was so parched. Stick to business, she decided. Strictly business.

“We have one engine out and serious damage to the left wing,” she said, surprised at how shaky her voice sounded. “Plane’s buffeting badly. North Korean interceptors have ordered us to land at their base.”

No response. Silence. No, Christopher realized. She heard a buzz of voices. They’re talking. A lot of people. Somebody laughed! We’re flying on three engines and a shredded wing and they’re laughing back there in Washington!

O’Banion called, “Colonel, the gooks are telling us to follow them.”

“Let’s hear it,” she said.

“American 747,” said the same hard, cool man’s voice, “you will follow us to a DPRK air base and land there. You will be interned and treated well. If you do not follow this command we will be forced to shoot you down.”

Christopher thought it over for two seconds, then told O’Banion, “Plug me in to him, Captain.”

“You’re on,” O’Banion replied.

“This is ABL-1,” she said, working to keep her voice steady. “I read you.”

“Turn to a heading of three hundred ten degrees and follow me.”

“Turning to three-ten.” She eased the control yoke slightly leftward.

“What’re you doing?” Kaufman screeched.

“Keep your shorts on, Obie,” Colonel Christopher muttered. Silently she said to the North Korean interceptor pilot, Now pull up in front of me, wiseass. Get in front where I can fry you.

San Francisco: The Cow Palace

“Shot ‘em down!” Norman Foster exulted. The President whirled on his chief of staff. “Both of them?”

Foster pressed his cell phone to his ear, a wide grin spreading across his normally dour face. “Both of ‘em.” He held up two fingers.

Grinning back at him, the President said, “Now
that’s
something to tell the audience out there.”

Foster’s grin evaporated. “Wait a minute,” he said into the phone, “let me tell him.” Looking at the President, he said, “The North Koreans shot at our plane. Damaged it badly.”

“How bad?”

“It’s still flying, apparently. But the gooks want them to land in North Korea.”

“No!” the President snapped. “They can’t have that plane. And they’ll use the crew as hostages.”

“The alternative is they shoot the plane down and the crew dies.”

Biting his lip, the President paced the length of the bare-walled little room before replying, “Get Pyongyang on the horn. Tell them we hold them responsible.”

“And they’ll say we violated their airspace.”

“Call them anyway. We have to be on the correct side of this.”

“If you’d allowed a fighter escort--”

“We’d be in a shooting war by now!”

Foster shook his head. “What makes you think we’re not?”

In ABL-1‘s cockpit, both Colonel Christopher and Major Kaufman were hanging on to the control yokes with both hands. The plane was still vibrating badly and slowly losing altitude. The Sea of Japan looked a rippled gray sheet of steel. But Christopher’s attention was on the DPRK MiG-29 that had moved up in front of her, heading for the coast and a landing in North Korea.

“O’Banion, get Hartunian on the intercom for me.”

“Yes’m.”

“Hartunian here.”

“Do you have enough fuel left to shoot down a couple of fighter planes?”

She heard him gasp. Then, “Yeah, I think so, just about, if you can put us in a position to lay the beam on them.”

“I’ve got one of them sitting in front of us now, about eleven o’clock, level.”

“Give me a minute ...”

The plane lurched again as Harry turned to Nakamura, sitting at the console beside him. His safety harness cut into his shoulders. I’m going to be black and blue tomorrow, Harry thought. If we’re still alive tomorrow.

“You ready to fire again?” he asked Nakamura.

His voice sounded unnaturally loud, urgent, in his own ears.

“Another missile?” Taki shouted back.

“Gook fighter plane.”

She blinked at Harry once, then said merely, “Let’s see if I can get acquisition; we’re bouncing around so much ...” She began to peck at her keyboard.

As he watched her, Harry mumbled, “Sorry about the ‘gook,’ Taki. I wasn’t thinking.”

Without taking her eyes from her console’s screens, Nakamura said, deadpan, “That’s okay. I’m not offended. I’m a nip, not a gook.”

“Oh.”

“Get your terminology straight, round-eye.”

Harry almost started to chuckle.

“Acquisition!” Nakamura called out. “No! Jumped out. The plane’s shaking too much, Harry. I can’t get a lock on the target.”

“You’ve got to.”

“If they could hold us steady for half a minute ...”

Harry toggled the intercom switch. “Colonel, we’ve got the fighter in our sights, but we’re bouncing around so much we can’t get a lock on it.”

Without an instant’s hesitation, Colonel Christopher’s voice replied, “Not much I can do about it, mister.”

Sitting tensely at the table in the situation room, General Scheib heard the intercom chatter from ABL-1. His laptop screen was blank, he was getting audio only, but it was enough to make him sweat with anxiety.

Standing in front of the wall screen image of the now-empty North Korean launch site, General Higgins said loudly, “Well, we showed the world that we can shoot down ballistic missiles. We’ve changed the global strategic picture.”

Zuri Coggins shook her head. “Not if they shoot down our plane, General. All we’ve shown is that we can trade a very expensive aircraft and crew for a couple of cheap missiles.”

Scheib glanced at the others, who had drifted toward the wall screen display and stood around General Higgins. Quietly he called up on his laptop screen the command organization of Misawa Air Base.

“He’s got to be there,” Scheib muttered to himself as he scrolled down the list of names.

And there he was: Mitchell Watson, executive officer of the Thirty-fifth Fighter Wing, headquartered at Misawa.

Japan: Misawa Air Base

“Brad, are you nuts?” Brigadier General Mitch Watson stared at the image of his old friend and Academy classmate on the screen of his telephone console.

“I’m deadly serious, Mitch,” said Brad Scheib. He certainly looked serious, Watson thought. Absolutely grim.

Watson leaned back in his desk chair. His eye caught the tennis trophy that he and Scheib had won back at the Academy. It was Watson’s year to hold the silver-plated cup.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, jabbing a lean finger at his old friend’s image. “You want me to scramble a flight of F-16s out to North by-damn Korea?”

Nodding tightly, Scheib answered, “There’s a 747 out there in trouble. Over the Sea of Japan, near the coast. Your Falcons could mean the difference between life and death for the crew.”

“I’m supposed to do this on your authorization.”

“I’ve got a priority code from the National Security Advisor’s office.”

Trying to read Scheib’s taut expression, Watson realized, There’s more to this than he’s telling me.

“Why in the ever-loving blue-eyed world should I do this? It’s crazy!”

“You don’t want to know, Mitch.”

Watson puffed out a breath. “That bad, huh?”

With another nod, Scheib said, “Just get some fighters out to that plane. Scare the bandits off.”

“And to hell with the chain of command, huh?”

“I gave you the priority code. It’s my responsibility, Mitch. You’re just following orders.”

“Yeah,” said Watson, wondering if he wasn’t flushing his career down the toilet. “Sure.”

ABL-1: Cockpit

The MiG-27 was painted a dull brownish gray
,
the same color as the hills up ahead, Colonel Christopher realized. Her 747 was still shaking badly, bouncing around as if it were caught inside a thunderhead.

“We’re gonna be crossing their coastline,” Major Kaufman said.

“Tell me about it, Obie.”

“You want to shoot that guy down?” Kaufman clearly didn’t like the idea.

“If we can, Obie. If we can.”

“And what does the other one do? He’s still on our tail, isn’t he?”

Christopher didn’t reply to him. Instead, she called down to Hartunian, “Can you lock on or not?”

“If you could keep the plane steadier we could,” came the engineer’s response.

“Maybe you ought to come up here and try flying this bird,” Christopher snapped.

“I wouldn’t be any--”

Suddenly the woman tech’s voice shrilled, “Lock! We’re locked on!”

“Zap the bastard!” Christopher snapped.

Nothing happened. The North Korean MiG flew several hundred yards in front of them just as before.

“What are you guys doing down there?” Christopher demanded.

“We hit him,” Hartunian said. “The instruments show we hit him.”

Christopher started to shake her head, but Kaufman took one hand off the control yoke and pointed a shaking finger at the MiG.

“Look!”

A thin trail of whitish smoke was streaming from a spot on the MiG’s fuselage halfway between the cockpit and the jet engine’s tailpipe.

“Is that all you can--”

Christopher clamped her mouth shut. The MiG’s fuselage was burning. A bright cherry-red circle of flame was growing, spreading. The plane’s aluminum skin was on fire.

“It’s burning!” Kaufman shouted.

“Took a few seconds to burn off the paint,” said Hartunian, almost apologetically.

Colonel Christopher watched as the burning circle spread across the MiG’s rear section. The plane yawed violently to the left and suddenly its clear plastic canopy popped off and the pilot ejected, his seat firing up and out while the MiG slid off on one wing and began to spiral toward the sea below. She leaned forward and craned her neck to watch the pilot separate from his seat. A heartbeat later his chute streamed out and billowed. She could see the man’s tiny figure hanging beneath the parachute’s canopy.

“We got him!” Kaufman exulted.

“Right turn, Obie,” Christopher commanded. “We’re heading for Misawa.”

The lumbering 747 turned slowly while the second MiG flew past them and began to circle the pilot descending into the water in his parachute.

“Let’s get our butts out of here,” Colonel Christopher said.

Kaufman muttered, “Before the whole gook air force comes after us.”

“Colonel, DPRK air command is calling again,” O’Banion reported.

Wishing she were flying a B-2 instead of this beat-up hulk of a transport plane, Christopher said, “Put him on.”

The man’s voice sounded more agitated. “American 747, one of our fighters has suffered a malfunction. Nevertheless you will continue to follow a heading of three hundred ten degrees. Another flight of our planes will escort you to a landing in the DPRK.”

Christopher thumbed her radio switch. “This is United States 747 ABL-1. We are leaving North Korean airspace and returning to Japan. Out.”

To O’Banion she said, “No more transmissions on their frequency, Captain. Let’s get away from here before they send out more fighters.”

Kaufman nodded. “Amen to that.”

U.S. Route 12, Bitterroot Mountains, Idaho

Charley Ingersoll’s hands were completely numb. He couldn’t feel anything with them. When he tried to wipe the snow off his face it was like a pair of wooden boards scraping against his frozen nose.

With some surprise, he realized that the pain was gone. Numb. Freezing. At least it don’t hurt anymore, he realized. God never gives you a trial that’s too much for you. He watches over you all the time.