side.
“I’m only doing forty,” he growled. He didn’t tell her that the road felt slick, slippery in spots.
The radio crackled with the distant voice of a sportscaster reporting that the Seattle Seahawks expected to have perfect football weather for Sunday’s game against the San Diego Chargers.
Big fornicating deal, Charley grumbled to himself.
At least a snowplow had been through this stretch of highway, Charley realized. There was less than an inch of snow on the roadway. Good, he thought, leaning a little more heavily on the accelerator. Fifty miles an hour. That’s better than—
There was ice under the coating of snow and the van suddenly spun a full circle before Charley could do anything about it. Martha screamed and the kids yelled. The van smacked sideways into a mound of snow on the shoulder of the road, with Charley jamming both his feet on the brake.
Charley could feel his heart hammering beneath his ribs. Martha was sobbing. Glancing over his shoulder Charley saw that both the kids seemed okay. White-faced and wide-eyed, but unhurt. Their seat belts had kept them from being banged around.
“You okay back there?” he asked, surprised at how his voice shook.
“Yessir,” said Charley Jr. “I think so.”
“Me too,” Little Martha echoed.
“How about you?” Charley asked his wife.
“My chest hurts.”
“The seat belt must have caught you.”
“I think I’m having a heart attack.”
“You’re not having a heart attack. It’s just the seat belt. I bet I’m bruised too.”
From the backseat Little Martha piped up. “Can we go outside and make a snowman?”
Major Joseph E. Dugan, USAF, had learned one vitally important thing in his military career: when you need a job done, and done right the first time, get an experienced noncom to do it.
He stood in a lightly misting rain in front of the hangar closest to the flight line and watched befuddled maintenance crews towing planes out into the drizzle and parking them helter-skelter across the apron.
Standing beside him was Technical Sergeant Aaron “Scrap Iron” Clinton, hard-eyed and humorless, his skin as dark as an eggplant, fists planted on the hips of his rumpled fatigues, an unlit cigar clamped in his teeth. The “seegar,” as Clinton called them, was Clinton’s hallmark. He never smoked them. He chewed them.
When Joe Dugan’s old friend and senior major, Hank Wilson, had commanded him to have the incoming KC- 135 refitted with a replacement engine in one hour or less after its landing, Dugan fell back on his crucial piece of military wisdom. He sprinted over to the base maintenance center and hollered for Sergeant Clinton.
“Sergeant,” he bellowed, “there’s a KC-135 tanker due in here in twenty minutes. It’s got to have an engine replaced and be back in the air in one hour.”
Sergeant Clinton had been through a lot in his Air Force career. Twice he had been broken down to airman for getting caught with his pants down in married women’s bedrooms. Three times he had been offered a chance for a commission—and refused.
“I ain’t officer material,” he had insisted in his stubborn Arkansas drawl. “I work for a livin’.”
Now this white major was demanding the impossible. Clinton saluted and said, around his unlit cigar, “One hour. Yes, sir!”
That was why, as the ailing KC-135 taxied right into the hangar that had been emptied for it, its pilot stared goggle-eyed at the small army of technicians in Air Force fatigues who swarmed around the plane even while its engines were wheezing to a stop.
“Holy shit!” the pilot exclaimed. “It looks like a pit crew from the Indianapolis 500 out there!”
“Colonel, I’ve got the fuel bingo calculated.” Karen Christopher nodded as she sat at the controls of ABL-1. “Plug it into the flight plan, Jon,” she said to her navigator.
Shannon’s voice in her headphone sounded reluctant. “I don’t have really good numbers for wind velocities, Colonel. With the satellites down and all...”
“Give me three estimates,” said Colonel Christopher. “Best case, worst case, and the average between them.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
In a few minutes numbers began to flicker on the control panel’s central display screen. Christopher watched them scroll by, then they steadied and held still.
In the right-hand seat, Major Kaufman grunted, glanced at the panel’s digital clock, then checked his wristwatch. “Thirty-eight minutes. Then we gotta turn back for Misawa.”
“That’s the worst case,” the colonel said. “If the winds don’t buck us too hard we can stretch it another ten, fifteen minutes.”
Kaufman said nothing, but the look on his face told Christopher what he thought of stretching their luck. She gave him a faint smile. “Think we should put on our life vests, Obie, just in case?”
“That ain’t funny,” Kaufman muttered.
Christopher tapped the side of her helmet where the headphone was built in and called, “Brick, anything from Misawa about our tanker?”
O’Banion’s voice replied, “Nothing since they reported the bird landed, Colonel.”
Kaufman grumbled, “Misawa can’t talk to us, so they send the word to Washington and Washington relays the poop to us. Helluva way to run a mission.”
“Communications are snarled up,” Christopher said. But inwardly she agreed with her copilot. Communications were vital and this Top Secret mission was at the end of a long and very shaky tether.
“Wind velocity’s picking up some,” Sharmon reported.
With a nod, Colonel Christopher realized that they were facing the navigator’s worst-case option. Fuel bingo in twenty-nine minutes, she calculated. Looking out at the swirl of gray clouds covering the ocean below, she thought, If we go down it’ll be into a nasty bit of weather. Ditching a plane this size into a cold ocean in the middle of a major storm. Not a good career move.
Harry was sitting by himself in the cramped little galley beneath the flight deck. There were no windows to see outside, but he sensed that the plane was turning, leaning slightly to the left side as it made a wide, cumbersome turn.
Are we turning back? he wondered. Maybe I should check with Colonel Christopher. If we’re going back, then I could make it known to whoever tried to screw up the mission that he can relax, the mission’s scrubbed.
As he grasped his lukewarm mug of coffee with both hands Harry asked himself for the thousandth time: Who is it? Which one of them tried to stop this mission? Who took that optics assembly?
He sat in one of the galley’s undersized bucket seats and tried to puzzle it all out. Beam control is Monk’s job. He knows the most about it; it’d be easiest for him to take out the lens assembly. But he couldn’t have gone up there once we took off—the flight crew would have seen him. Whoever it was must’ve removed the assembly before we took off. And he hid it somewhere on the plane, most likely. Where? Maybe if I can find the lens assembly it’ll tell me something about who took it.
But Harry shook his head. Maybe if I could dust it for fingerprints. Not even then, he realized. Monk, Taki, Wally, even Angel had enough time to sneak up to the flight deck last night while we were doing the preflight and take the assembly out of the ranging laser. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to lift the assembly out of its fitting. It’s designed to pop in or pop out, just like Monk said.
