Harry looked up. A young airman was walking along the bricked pathway toward him.
“Hey . . . Sergeant,” Harry said, noting the stripes on his jacket sleeve.
“Can I help you, sir?”
Feeling sheepish, Hartunian admitted, “I’m kind of lost.”
The sergeant directed him down the street one block and then to the first right. “You can’t miss it,” he added cheerily.
Harry, who had been raised in the tangled suburbs of Boston, thought of all the “you can’t miss it” locations he’d missed. But he went to the corner and turned right.
And there was the mess hall, with dozens of men and women streaming into it. Most of them in uniform.
But what caught his attention was down at the end of the street, where a little Day-Glo orange tractor was towing ABL-1 out of its hangar. Harry gaped. The sight of the big 747, all white, never failed to awe him. It was an immense airplane with that graceful hump up front and the huge raked-back tail towering over the other planes parked in front of the hangars. Somehow she looked dignified to Harry, regal, like royalty as she grandly allowed herself to be slowly rolled out onto the tarmac.
Jerry Jarusulski frowned as he sat at the controls of the Airbus A350 XWB. Halfway between Hawaii and California, he grumbled to himself, and the nav system craps out.
Through the cockpit’s windshield he could see nothing but cloud-dotted ocean, steely gray and rippled with waves. Not a ship in sight. No land for another thousand klicks or more. “Anything?” he asked his copilot. “Not a peep, JJ,” said Pete Jacobson. “Every damned freak is out. I’m getting some commercial stations, L.A. and ‘Frisco. But all the air control frequencies are off.”
“What the hell’s happened to them?” “Something weird,” the copilot said. “Well, we’ll reach the California coast in another couple of hours. We can go to VFR then.”
Jacobson nodded, but he looked doubtful. Jarusulski shared his worries. Flying a big-ass jet airliner on visual wasn’t going to be easy, he knew. Always a helluva lot of traffic at LAX. And the last weather report they got predicted rain. Those guys in the tower better have their systems working if they expect me to bring this bird down. What a time for the navigation satellite system to go kablooey.
Jacobson started chuckling softly.
“What’s so goddamned funny?” Jarusulski growled.
“It’s like that old joke, the one about good news and bad news.”
Yeah?
“You know. The pilot gets on the intercom and tells the passengers, ‘I’ve got good news and bad news. The bad news is that we’re lost. I don’t know where the hell we are. The good news is we’ve got a tail wind and we’re making good time.’ ”
Jarusulski didn’t laugh. He was thinking about trying to land this jumbo bird in the rain. LAX better have its comm systems working, he said to himself. If they don’t, we’re toast. Burnt toast.
The Oval Office was crowded.
Hunching forward in the padded chair behind his gleaming broad desk, the President muttered, “From North Korea,” his lean face bleak, his voice ominous.
In a shallow semicircle in front of the desk sat the Secretaries of Defense and State, the National Security Advisor, the director of Homeland Security and the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Off to one side of the room the President’s chief of staff sat on one of the striped sofas in front of the empty fireplace, his hands clasped tensely on his knees. Half a dozen aides were back there, too.
“Pyongyang has been on the wire with us for three hours now,” said the Secretary of State. Her normally cool demeanor was gone; she looked just as worried—almost frightened—as the rest of the people in the Oval Office.
“They’re pissing themselves, they’re so scared,” the National Security Advisor added, with a grim smile. A former admiral, he still looked as if he were in uniform, despite his light gray hand-tailored three-piece suit. His silver hair was tousled, though; he’d been running his hands through it since this meeting had begun.
Frowning slightly at him, the Secretary of State said, “The North Korean government is begging us to show some restraint—”
“Restraint?” the President snapped. “They’ve attacked us!”
State raised a brow.
“That missile came from North Korea,” said the Secretary of Defense in his heavy, rasping voice. “We traced its launch and its orbital track.”
“But it wasn’t launched from one of their regular launching bases,” State insisted. “Pyongyang assures us that the North Korean government did not authorize the launch or the detonation of that bomb in orbit.”
“What difference does that make?” the President growled. “It came from their territory. It’s knocked out just about every satellite in orbit.”
“Except for our hardened birds,” Defense pointed out. He was the oldest man in the room, a former longtime senator, bald and jowly. He and the Secretary of State had been senators together and rivals for the nomination that the man behind the desk had won.
State raised a manicured hand. “Wait a minute. Since Kim Jong Il died last year North Korea’s been in turmoil, practically civil war.”
“Their military took control of the government,” the National Security Advisor said.
“Yes,” State agreed, “but there are factions within the military. One of the rebel factions must have fired that missile.”
“What difference does that make?”
“Pyongyang tells us they’re sending troops to the site where the missile was launched. They’re asking us to allow them to solve the problem by themselves.”
“Won’t wash,” said the Security Advisor.
“Are you saying we should send in our own troops?” the President asked.
“Or hit that launch site with an air strike?” State added.
The Security Advisor turned slightly toward the oversized television screen mounted on the wall between portraits of Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt. Without asking the President’s permission, he half rose from his chair and reached for the remote control unit on the desk.
The wall screen flickered, then showed a satellite image of rugged, mountainous country. Snowpacks covered many of the peaks; from orbit they looked like bony white fingers stretching across the bare brown mountains.
“NRO satellite imagery, two hours old,” said the Security Advisor. “That’s the area where the missile came from.”
The view zoomed in dizzyingly, then steadied to show a leveled area of ground where a dozen brown military trucks were parked in a ragged circle. At the center of the circle two missiles were standing on portable launch pads. A third pad was empty.
“That’s where the missile was launched,” said the Security Advisor. “As you can see, they have two more ready to go.”
