Able One

“Nervous? Kind of,” Harry admitted. “Aren’t you?”

Delany shrugged. “Why should I be nervous? The gooks are about to start World War III and we’re in the middle of the action. What’s there to be nervous about?”

Harry wanted to laugh, but the best he could do was to crack a thin smile.

“You checked the optics?” he asked Delany. “Everything’s on the tick. No problems.” “Where’s Taki?”

“Up at the battle management console, where she should be. Maybe they’ll give her an Air Force commission if she nails those gook missiles.”

Harry knew that he and the other civilians were manning the laser only because this was supposed to be a test flight. We’re only a skeleton crew at best, he thought. When the system’s declared operational, Air Force personnel will take over. With more than twice the number of their five-person team, at that.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll go up forward and see how she’s making out.”

Delany gave him that sloppy salute of his. “Aye, aye, skipper.”

Harry shook his head. “This isn’t the Navy, Monk.”

“We ain’t the Air Force, either.”

The COIL’s channel ran through the length of the plane, past the crew compartment and galley, beneath the flight deck and cockpit, and into the bulbous turret that made the plane’s nose look like a potato. Taki Nakamura’s station was up forward, at the electronics consoles that monitored the plane’s sensors and the laser’s output beam.

Taki’s battle management compartment was directly beneath the flight deck. Harry scanned the row of consoles, most of them dark and unused until they powered up the laser. The plane’s slight swaying was more noticeable up here near the nose. Like a ship at sea, Harry thought. This big lunk of an airplane must weigh a hundred tons, but it still pitches up and down a little.

Nakamura was sitting at the main console, her fingers flicking across the keyboard, her eyes focused intently on the display screen.

“Everything okay, Taki?” asked Harry.

She looked up at him, her lean, sculpted face utterly serious. “Everything’s in the green, jefe.”

Harry nodded to her. He remembered that Pete Quintana was the guy they originally called el jefe, the boss. Harry inherited the title when Anson put him in charge of the team, after Pete was killed. An gel Reyes had even gotten his wife to stitch the title onto some of Harry’s T-shirts and coveralls. Victor Anson had never seen it, thank god. There was only one god in heaven, Anson always said, and one head of Anson Aerospace. Yet Anson had never come out to the desert to see the test rig, never even made his way down to the working section of his own company’s laboratory in Pasadena. He stayed in his office. People came to him.

Harry patted Taki’s slim shoulder and moved forward, past the battle management compartment and into the nose of the mammoth airplane. Here was the beam control station, Monk Delany’s domain, the business end of the COIL, where megawatts of infrared energy fed through the ball-shaped turret in the plane’s nose and lanced out toward the target.

The controls for the ranging laser were there, too. Perched in a housing atop the flight deck’s hump, the ranger was a smaller carbon dioxide laser that was used like a radar to fix the location of the target and feed that data to the big COIL for the kill. Slaved to the sensors that spotted the missile’s hot rocket plume, the smaller laser pinpointed the missile’s position and distance. The turret in the plane’s nose moved in response to the data from the ranging laser and then, zap! the COIL fired and the missile was destroyed.

Harry noticed that the ranging laser’s console was not powered up. Idly, he sat at the console and flicked it on. The central screen glowed to life, and the words SYSTEM MALFUNCTION burned themselves onto it.

What the hell? Harry thought. System malfunction?

“What’re you doing, Harry?”

He looked up and saw Monk Delany looming over him.

“Something’s wrong with the ranger.”

Delany leaned over his shoulder and pecked at the console’s keyboard, SYSTEM MALFUNCTION glowered at them.

“Shit,” said Delany. “You been screwing around with my program?”

“No, I just turned the console on,” Harry said.

Mumbling unhappily, Delany nudged Harry out of the seat and took over the console himself. After several moments he shrugged in frustration.

“Something’s wrong,” he said.

“No kidding.” Harry knew that without the ranging laser to feed targeting information to the COIL, the whole system was useless.

“Lemme fiddle with it,” Monk said, still looking at Harry as if it were his fault.

“I’ll go check the rig,” Harry said.

“You can’t check it while we’re in the air,” Monk growled.

Harry patted his muscular shoulder. “You can’t, ape-man. You’re too big to squeeze in there. But I’m small enough to do it.”

“You’ll break your stupid ass.”

Harry heaved a sigh and said, “It’s got to be done, Monk. Otherwise we’ll have to turn around and go home.”

Monk said nothing, but the look on his face told Harry that he wouldn’t mind returning to Elmendorf, not at all.

ABL-1: Flight Deck

Harry left Monk sweating and swearing at the ranging laser console and clambered up the ladder to the flight deck. The two Air Force officers looked startled to see him.

“I need to check the laser assembly,” Harry said, pointing overhead.

The redheaded captain said, “Colonel Christopher ought to know about this, sir.”

Nodding, Harry said, “Let her know, then.” The captain spoke into his pin mike and an instant later Colonel Christopher popped through the hatch from the cockpit.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Hartunian?” She looked nettled.

“I’ve got to check the ranging laser.”

“In flight? I thought that unit was sealed off while the plane’s pressurized.”

“The laser housing is pressurized too,” Harry explained. “This won’t endanger the plane.”

She looked unconvinced. “Is this really necessary, or are you just...” She let her voice trail off, but Harry got the implication loud and clear: Are you nerds just playing around with your techie toys?

“It’s completely necessary,” he replied. “Without the ranging laser we can’t lock onto a target.”

Planting her fists on her hips, Colonel Christopher asked tightly, “Are you telling me that the ranging subsystem is down?”

“That’s right. We’re trying to find out what’s wrong with it and get it fixed.”

She stood there before him, her face set in an angry frown. Abruptly she turned to the young lieutenant and commanded, “Jon, you’re the tallest guy we’ve got. Give Mr. Hartunian all the help you can.”

Lieutenant Sharmon got up from his console, his close-cropped hair nearly brushing the overhead.

“Thank you, Colonel,” Harry said.

“Get it fixed, Mr. Hartunian.”

“Harry,” he said automatically.

Colonel Christopher looked as if she wanted to breathe fire. “Mr. Hartunian,” she repeated.

With Lieutenant Sharmon’s help, Harry unscrewed the plate that covered the ranging laser’s mount.

The tubular housing for the ranging laser was too tight for Harry to do more than stick his head through the opening. The plane’s engines sounded louder up here, the vibrations heavier. It felt cold, too. Harry realized that