Able One (5 page)

Higgins shook his head ponderously. “I don’t see how that connects with what we’ve got here.”

His brows knitting slightly, Jamil explained, “North Korea hurts us. We hit back at North Korea. The Chinese don’t like that, so they attack us. We counterattack China. Russia comes in, and once that happens NATO gets involved.”

“Full-scale nuclear war,” Higgins’ civilian aide breathed in an awed voice.

“Armageddon,” someone whispered, loudly enough for them all to hear it.

Elmendorf Air Force Base

“The GPS is off-line?” Lieutenant Sharmon looked shocked.

The iron gray-haired tech sergeant standing behind the counter made a face that was halfway between apologetic and disgusted. He was more than twice the lieutenant’s age and had spent most of his time in the Air Force making young shavetails look good.

“The system went off-line a couple hours ago, sir. All the satellite links are down. Must be those damn northern lights.” Then he added, “Sir.”

From the other side of the flight control center, Colonel Christopher could see the alarm on Sharmon’s face. She walked across the worn tile flooring toward him.

“Something wrong, Lieutenant?”

Sharmon shook his head, his brows knit into a tight furrow. “The GPS is down, ma’am.”

Christopher almost smiled, but she held herself in check. “Then you’ll just have to navigate without it.”

“I guess I will, ma’am.” Sharmon clearly was not happy with that prospect.

Christopher stepped away from the counter and the listening tech sergeant, motioning Sharmon to follow her.

Lowering her voice, she asked, “Do I call you Eustis? And you don’t have to be so formal; you can drop the ‘ma’am’ business while we’re on duty together. Just call me Colonel. Unless there’s bigger brass around, of course.”

She remembered how some of the wiseasses at the Academy used to call her Chrissie, just to rile her. She had kept her temper under control, hidden, until graduation day. That’s when they found their shoes had been glued to the dorm ceiling, all of them. They had to attend the graduation ceremony in bedroom slippers and flip-flops and got reprimanded for being out of uniform. They never tumbled to the possibility that five-foot-four Karen Christopher could reach the ceilings of their rooms while they slept.

Lieutenant Sharmon made an effort to smile. “Thank you, ma ... uh, thank you, Colonel. My middle name is Jon. Without an aitch. My friends call me Jon.”

“All right, Jon. That’s what I’ll call you. We’re not friends yet, but maybe we will be.”

He did smile, faintly. “Thank you, Colonel.”

“Now, don’t sweat this GPS business. It’s just a crutch anyway. You’re a trained navigator. You can get us to our correct position out over the ocean without it, can’t you?”

“Yes ... uh, Colonel. But I’d feel a lot better with the GPS to back me up.”

Christopher said, “You’ll do fine, Jon. This is just a milk run anyway. We run a racetrack pattern while the nerds play with their laser. So don’t sweat it.”

“Thank you, Colonel.” Sharmon still looked unconvinced.

Christopher nodded at him once, then turned and headed for the meteorology desk. Poor kid looks scared to death, she said to herself. Then a voice in her head warned, He’s not a poor kid and he’s not your friend. He’s supposed to be a navigator and you’re supposed to be his superior officer. Keep it that way.

Her copilot, Major Obadiah Kaufman, was already at the weather desk, looking red-nosed and bleary-eyed. Either he’s had a late night, Christopher thought, or he’s got some bug--which he’ll pass on to the rest of us, for sure.

“No metsat data,” said Major Kaufman, in lieu of a greeting.

He was a round butterball of a man, not much taller than Christopher herself. She wondered how he passed his physicals, he looked so out of shape. And miserably unhappy. So would I be, she thought, if I got bounced out of the pilot’s job for some stranger.

“What do you mean, no metsat data, Obie?”

Kaufman’s bloodshot eyes flared at her use of his nickname, but he immediately clamped down on his resentment.

The harried-looking female captain in charge of the meteorology desk confirmed from the other side of the counter, “The weather satellites went down a couple of hours ago, Colonel. We don’t have anything for you except the local weather forecast, from the base’s met instruments.”

“All the metsats are down?” Christopher asked. It was hard to believe.

“The whole civilian satellite system is down, ma’am,” said the captain. She looked frightened, as if the system failure would be blamed on her.

“What about our own metsats? Are they down, too?”

“No, ma’am. The milsats are operational. But the comm system’s overloaded. Swamped. Data requests from everybody, all at once. They’re running half an hour late. More.”

Christopher studied the captain’s face for a moment. The younger woman looked as if she expected to get reamed out by the colonel.

“Give me the latest you’ve got, then,” Christopher said mildly, “and update me as soon as you get more data.”

“Yes’m.” The captain looked distinctly relieved. Major Kaufman took out a large red-and-white-checked handkerchief and snuffled into it. Looks like he swiped it from an Italian restaurant, Christopher thought.

Kaufman mumbled an excuse and headed for the men’s room. Colonel Christopher decided not to wait for him and left the control center together with Lieutenant Sharmon, he tall and gangly, she petite and graceful. Both in Air Force flight suits, plastic helmets cradled in their arms. As they headed out toward the flight line, Christopher thought, This could be an interesting flight. “Interesting” was a term she reserved, like other fliers, for situations that were either hairy or downright terrifying.

Out on the flight line it was gray and raw; the wet wind gusting in off the water sliced right through Harry’s goose-down coat. It made his back ache sullenly. He squinted up at the clouds, low and dark, thick with moisture. A low gray bank of fog blanketed the far side of the airfield; he couldn’t even see the end of the runway. Harry wondered if they’d have enough visibility to get the plane off the ground. Nothing seemed to be moving out on the flight line. No planes were taking off; everything was as quiet as a tomb except for the low moan of the wind.

We moved to California to get away from this kind of miserable weather, Harry thought as he trudged out toward the ABL-1 plane. Had enough dark, cold winters in New England. It’s dry in California; even when it rains it’s never bleak and nasty like this. When we wanted snow we drove up into the mountains.

Harry remembered teaching his two daughters to ski. They loved the snow. Why not? he asked himself. They never had to shovel the stuff off a driveway. Wonder what they’re doing now? Probably taking a dip in the pool. Sylvia liked to swim. She spent more time in that damned pool than she did in bed with me. And after the accident...

He reached the plane. The huge 747-400F loomed above Harry like a giant aluminum iceberg. He stopped at the foot of the narrow ladder that led to the plane’s innards and tried his cell phone again. Victor Anson had made it painfully clear that he wanted to be called each time Harry and his crew flew a mission.

But the damned phone was still on the fritz. Harry scowled at it. Modern technology at its finest, he grumbled silently. It can perform nineteen dozen different functions and none of them are working.

The flight crew was climbing aboard up front, by the plane’s bulbous nose. He saw the new pilot and a tall, lean, black lieutenant with her. They ride first class, Harry thought. We ride coach, in the back of the plane. He shrugged. He’d met the new pilot only briefly the night before, when she’d introduced herself to his team. She was good-looking, that was true. Rosenberg had barely kept his eyes in his head.

Delany and the rest of the Anson team trudged across the tarmac and started climbing the stairs and entering the plane. Wally Rosenberg, last in line, noticed Harry trying to work his phone and cast him a snide grin.

“Calling our new flygirl?”

Fuck you, Harry thought. Aloud, he answered, “Phoning the boss.”

“Levy? He’s prob’ly heading for coffee break. It’s an hour earlier back in sunny California.”

“Not Jake. Anson.”

Rosenberg’s brows rose. “The big boss?”

“The man whose name’s on our coveralls. Yeah.”

“You talk to Anson?”

Harry nodded wearily. “He wants to know what we’re doing. He’s got a lot riding on this system.”

For once, Rosenberg did not have a flip retort. He merely nodded, then clambered up the shaky aluminum ladder. Harry gave up on the dead phone, stuffed it into the pocket of his bulky coat, and started up the ladder after him. His back twinged with every step.

Travis Broadcasting Systems, Atlanta

“They can’t
all
be down!” Tad Travis insisted. “Not ever’ last one of ‘era!” Herman Scott pushed his rimless glasses up against the bridge of his nose more firmly. He’d never met Mr. Travis before, except once at an office Christmas party where the corporation’s founder, CEO, and self-proclaimed genius was more interested in the younger female staffers than a tech geek with an MIT ring where a wedding band ought to be.

“Every last one of them, I’m afraid,” Scott said softly.

Travis glared at him as he paced feverishly between the rows of useless consoles. The great man had come down to the monitoring center, the first appearance he’d ever made below the top floor of the office tower, as far as Scott knew. The wall screens were still dead, the monitors still showing nothing but hissing static.

“For what it’s worth,” Scott continued, standing in front of his useless console, “every other satellite constellation is down, too. GeoStar, Intelsat, Galaxy, AMC ... all of them.”

“XM, too?” Travis asked. “I got money in XM.”

“XM, too. They’ve all been wiped out.”

“Sweet Jesus!”

Scott waited for the outburst. Travis was famous for his volcanic temper.

The great man stopped his pacing and whirled on Scott. “You get the White House on the line! I wanna talk to the President! Pronto!”

Scott wondered how he could break the news to his boss that he’d called Washington an hour ago, trying to reach the corporation’s office in the capital, only to find that all the satellite communications links were down and the landlines were jammed with frantic, urgent calls.

The Pentagon: Situation Room

Zuri Coggins closed the phone link on her book-sized minicomputer, which she had plugged into the Pentagon’s communications network. Cell phone reception was too spotty for this call; besides, the landline was more secure. Looking up at the people sitting tensely around the table, she said, “The Oval Office says the President’s already on his way to San Francisco. Air Force One took off twenty minutes ago.”

“Then call it back,” General Higgins snapped.

Shaking her head annoyedly, Coggins said, “Only the President himself has that authority.”

“You’ve got to get him to turn back,” said one of the civilians on the other side of the table.

“I’m trying,” Coggins said. “I have a call in to him aboard the plane.”

Down near the end of the conference table, Michael Jamil muttered something.

“What was that?” General Higgins demanded.

Looking suddenly embarrassed, Jamil said, “The President has a sort of macho reputation. Maybe the terrorists--or whoever has those missiles--are counting on him going on to San Francisco despite the risk.”

Higgins’ thick-jowled face darkened. “How do you know they’re going to hit San Francisco?”

Jamil shrugged slightly. “It’s only an educated guess, General, but San Francisco’s the logical target. The place where they can do the most damage to us.”

“How do we know they’re terrorists?” Higgins demanded. “From what we know about this, they’re a faction of the North Korean army.”

“A faction that wants to plunge the world into nuclear war,” Jamil argued.

“Fanatics?” asked Higgins’ aide.

“Muslim jihadists?”

“The Koreans aren’t Muslim.”

“They’re Communists,” Higgins said firmly. “Atheists.”

Coggins said, “But the fact is that, for whatever reason, they’ve knocked out just about every un-hardened satellite in orbit around the entire world.”

“It could be the Chinese behind it all,” Jamil suggested. “The North Koreans could be pawns for the Chinese.”

“But why would China ...?”

Unconsciously going into a lecturer’s tone, like a schoolteacher, Jamil said, “The Chinese have been hit by this global recession harder than we have. Their people were starting to expect a rising economic tide. Now they’re facing cutbacks, unemployment, economic slowdown.”

“Who isn’t?” General Higgins retorted.

“There’s been a lot of unrest, especially out in the provinces. Riots, even. And Beijing blames us for it. They claim the recession started in America and then spread to China and elsewhere.”

“And for this they’re willing to go to war?” Coggins asked, clearly unconvinced.

“Their government isn’t monolithic. They have factions, just like everywhere else. The hard-liners in Beijing have long maintained that they could survive a nuclear war,” Jamil replied. “They’ve got more than a billion people, and they’ve built extensive underground shelter complexes deep in the mountains of their western regions.”

“Are their government leaders moving to those shelters?” General Scheib asked.

“How would we know?” replied the man from the National Reconnaissance Office. “Both of our recon birds looking down at the region have gone dark.”

“Like the civilian satellites?” Higgins asked.

The NRO man shook his head. “No, it’s more like their optics have been degraded. Maybe by a laser beam.”

Jamil tapped a fingernail on the tabletop. “Maybe that’s why they’ve knocked out the other satellites as well. So we couldn’t see them heading for their shelters.”

Coggins looked down the table at him. “What did you call that doomsday scenario?” “Sarajevo,” said Jamil. “Sarajevo,” she whispered.