And while he has, I’m sure, points to recommend him…”
Balboa paused, making it clear he was struggling for something nice to say about the lieutenant colonel. Then he also made it clear he had given up.
“In the end, Bastian is a lieutenant colonel,” said Balboa. “What Dreamland needs to reach its potential is a
Samson sucked air.
“Of course, it’s not just the base,” added Balboa, obviously sensing a problem. “The Whiplash people, the Megafortresses—”
Samson cleared his throat. “I had been given to understand that I was to…that I was in line for Southern Command.”
Balboa made a face. “That’s not in the cards at the moment.”
“When is it in the cards?”
“This is an important assignment, General. Weapons development is just
Samson felt his face growing hot. No matter how much sugar Balboa tried to put on the assignment, it was a major comedown. He was deputy
Years before maybe, when he was still commanding a B-1B bomber wing, this might have been a step up. But not now. They had a
And what a lieutenant colonel. No one was going to outshine him. The brass would be far better off finding a single star general a year or so from retirement to take things in hand quietly.
“Questions?” Balboa asked.
“Sir—”
“You’ll have a free hand,” said Balboa, rising and extending his hand. “We want this to be a real command — an integral part of the system. It hasn’t been until now. We’re going to expand. You’re going to expand. You have carte blanche. Use it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Samson managed to shake Balboa’s hand, then left the office as quickly as he could.
Jennifer Gleason rose and put her hands on her hips, then began pacing at the back of the Command Center. She was due at Test Range 2B to check on the computer guidance system for the AIM-154 Anaconda interceptor missiles in a half hour. There had been troubles with the discriminator software, which used artificial intelligence routines to distinguish between civilian and military targets in fail-safe mode when the Identification Friend or Foe (IFF) circuitry failed. She had helped one of the engineers with the coding and agreed to sit in on today’s tests of the missile to see if the changes had been successful.
But she’d agreed to do that weeks ago, before the trouble in India. Before her lover, Colonel Bastian, had deployed, before her friends had been shot down trying to save the world, or at least a big part of it.
Jennifer, though modestly altruistic, didn’t really care about the world. She cared about Colonel Bastian. And Zen. And Breanna, though Breanna didn’t particularly like her. And even Mack Smith, class A jackass that he could be.
“I truly wish you would stop pacing up and down,” said Ray Rubeo. “Don’t you have a test or something to supervise?”
Jennifer glared at him. Rubeo could be a difficult taskmaster — nearly all the scientists at Dreamland preferred dealing with the military people rather than him — but she had never felt intimidated by the tall, skinny scientist. Rubeo made a face, then touched his silver earring stud — an unconscious tic that in this case was a sign of surrender. He scowled and went back to his computer screen.
“All right, we have the missile trajectories,” said one of the analysts nearby. “Do you want to see them, Dr. Rubeo? Or should I just zip the file and send it to the White House?”
“Hardly,” said Rubeo, his witheringly sarcastic voice back in full swing. “Put it on the main screen and let me have a look at it.”
“You think you know everything, Ray?” said Jennifer peevishly.
Immediately, she wanted to apologize. Sniping wasn’t her style and she admired Rubeo. And he was brilliant.
Even if he was full of himself.
Rubeo ignored her, rising and walking toward the large screen at the front of the room. Adapting one of the test programs used at Dreamland, the analysts had directed the computer to show the likely path of the missiles that had been disabled by the T-Rays. Bright red ellipses showed the areas they were most likely to have fallen in; the color got duller the lower the probability.
A review of the launch data showed that the Indians had fired twenty nuclear missiles, the Pakistanis eight. All were liquid-fueled. Besides the guidance and trigger circuitry in the warheads, a number of engine parts were particularly vulnerable to T-Rays, including the solenoid valves and electronic level sensors necessary for the engines to function properly. Failure of these items in most cases would choke off the engines, causing them to fall back to earth.
The question was: Where? According to the computer, all but two had fallen in the Great Thar Desert, a vast wasteland between the two countries on the Indian side of the border.
Rubeo walked toward the large screen at the front of the room. Folding his arms, he stood staring up at the map, as if being that close to the pixels somehow allowed his brain to absorb additional information.
“Problem, Ray?” asked Major Catsman, who’d been absorbed in something on the other side of the room.
“Two warheads are not showing up,” he told her.
“How can that be?”
“Hmmmph.”
“Are you sure the launch count is correct?” asked Jennifer.
Rubeo continued to stare. The analyst manning the computer that controlled the display began reassessing the data.
“We can give them what we have and tell them there may be a problem in the data,” said Catsman. “Better something than nothing.”
“The difficulty, Major,” said Rubeo, “is that the program doesn’t seem to realize the missiles aren’t there.”
His sarcasm was barely masked, but Catsman either missed it because she was tired or ignored it because she was used to Rubeo.
“Well, we better figure something out.”
“Hmmmph.”
“I’ll tell Colonel Bastian about it,” Catsman added. “He’s in the
“He’s in the
“The search operations for the rest of our downed crewmen have been slow. He wanted to kick-start them.”
Jennifer sat at one of the back consoles as Catsman made the connection. She looked away from the big screen when she heard his voice, afraid of what she might see in his face.
She wanted him home, safe; not tired, not battered, not pushed to his limit, as he always was on a mission.
She knew he would have scoffed at her, told her he wasn’t doing anything any other member of the team hadn’t done — anything that she hadn’t done herself a hundred times.
“How could the computer lose the missiles?” she heard him ask Rubeo.
“If I knew the answer, Colonel, I wouldn’t have mentioned the question,” Rubeo replied. He explained that
