Able One (13 page)

"Where are you going, Quintana?" Levy demanded, frowning.

Harry thought maybe Pete went outside because it was cooler there--at least a little breeze was blowing, unlike in here with this crappy air-conditioning.

But Pete answered softly, his voice muffled by the thick glass of the safety window, "Tightening up the mount. Keep the vibration level down."

"You shouldn't be out there when we're counting down," Levy yelled.

"I'll be back inside in a minute. Start the countdown, it's okay."

Levy frowned but turned to Harry and said darkly, "Start the countdown."

Harry glanced at General Scheib, then shrugged. Turning to Delany, he said, "Start the sequence timer, Monk."

The target sat half a mile out on the desert: the sawed-off end of a cargo plane, its fat round fuselage and big tailfin sticking up into the cloudless blue sky. There were several pinpoint holes in the plane's aluminum skin, blackened from the heat of the laser's beam.

General Scheib came up beside Harry and looked out at the laser assembly. "We can't have fussbudgets tinkering when we're flying that dingus. It's got to work without last-second adjustments."

"It will," Harry said tightly.

"Of course it will," Levy added. But the slight lift of his brow told Harry he was not happy.

Harry picked up the intercom microphone. "Hey, Pete, you'd better cut it short and get in here."

Still with his back to the safety window, Quintana hollered, "Yeah, yeah. I'm coming."

"Now," Harry said. "We want to start her up."

"So start her. I just want to check the vibration absorber on the optics platform. I'll be inside before you get her warmed up."

Harry looked at Levy, who frowned but said resignedly, "Get on with it."

Scheib shook his head slightly and thought, These civilians like to play with the equipment.

Engineers--they fall in love with the hardware. But they've got to make this beast foolproof, so that tech sergeants can run it without a half dozen geeks tinkering with it all the time.

He heard the whine of the electrical power generator starting up as he peered through the window. Quintana straightened up and planted his hands on his hips, as if admiring the equipment he had helped to build. The COIL looked to Scheib more like a miniature junkyard than a flight-weight laser system. Scheib knew the numbers and understood that these engineers had sized the laser to fit inside the capacious frame of a modified Boeing 747. Barely. But in the eyes of the newly minted general those pressure vessels and pumps and all that piping certainly didn't look like something that could ever get off the ground.

"Congratulations on the star."

Startled, Scheib turned to see Hartunian, one of the engineers, standing beside him.

Scheib was tall and trim, his body honed by a daily regimen of exercise and tennis. His face was lean, too, and handsome: sandy brown hair that was just starting to show some gray at the temples, light brown eyes that crinkled when he smiled. Women found him attractive, even out of uniform, something that his stylish, upscale wife didn't seem to mind in the least. Harry was roundish, almost pudgy, his wispy dark hair terminally unruly. But Scheib thought that Harry was sharper mentally than anyone on the laser team. He was just too self-effacing to push his advantage. Except on the tennis court. Harry beat the general at tennis whenever they played together. Brains over brawn, Scheib thought, although he would never admit it aloud.

"It's about time the Air Force gave you some recognition," Harry went on, his voice low enough that the rest of the people in the blockhouse couldn't hear him.

Almost flustered, Scheib replied, "Thank you, Harry. I didn't know you cared."

Harry grinned at him. "If they passed you up and you got reassigned, we'd have to break in a new blue-suiter."

Scheib nodded, thinking, It always comes down to what's best for numero uno. Well, I've got my star. Now if these clowns can make this contraption work I might even get a second star, eventually.

"Input power ready," called one of the technicians.

Harry turned away from the general and gave Levy a questioning look. "We're ready to power up."

"By all means," Levy said.

"Pete, get the hell in here," Delany thundered.

"On my way," Quintana yelled back.

"Initiate power sequence," Harry said, plucking his sticky shirt away from his chest.

"Initiating power sequence."

"Iodine pressure on the button," one of the technicians called out.

"Electrical power ramping up," another technician said.

"Optical bench ready."

"Atmospheric instability nominal."

"Adaptive optics on."

"Iodine flow in ten seconds."

"Oxygen flow in eight seconds."

"Pressurizing iodine."

"Pressurizing oxy."

Pete Quintana opened the door to the blockhouse.

Harry thought that Pete was cutting it awfully close. If anything goes wrong with--

The laser blew up in a spectacular blast that ripped the roof off the test shed. The explosion knocked everyone down; Harry smashed against the back wall of the control room, shattering his ribs against the gauges mounted on the concrete. A jagged piece of metal crashed through the safety window, shattering it into thousands of pellets as a hellish fireball billowed up into the cloudless blue sky. Pain roared through Harry while the heat from the oxygen-fed fire poured through, hot enough to melt the gauges on the back wall.

In the partially open doorway Pete Quintana was enveloped in the flames, screaming, gibbering, flailing in agony. Harry tried to reach out to him, but his own pain was so intense that he blacked out.

Groggily, General Scheib got to all fours, glass pellets crunching beneath his hands and feet. A twisted piece of pipe had embedded itself into the back wall of the blockhouse like a red-hot arrow.

Christ, Scheib thought, if the blast hadn't flattened me that thing would've torn my head off.

Levy and the engineers were all on the floor, knocked flat by the blast. They seemed dazed, in shock, faces and hands burned raw by the heat of the explosion. Hartunian looked unconscious. Scheib got to his feet slowly. The guy who'd been outside lay on the floor of the shed next to the burning, twisted shambles of the laser, a huddled lump of blackened flesh.

Slowly the others got up, coughing, dazed. Somewhere a fire siren was wailing, coming closer. Two of the engineers were helping the woman to her feet. Her face was burned; a trickle of blood ran down her cheek from her scalp. Levy pushed himself up to a sitting position, his shirt and trousers covered with grit. He looked angry, resentful, as if his beautiful machine had somehow betrayed him.

"It shouldn't have done that," Levy muttered through chipped teeth.

Yeah, right, Scheib thought.

Through the shattered window Scheib saw what was left of the COIL: twisted, blackened wreckage, wisps of dirty reddish smoke wafting into the sky. And the body of Pete Quintana, burned red and raw.

Hartunian moaned and opened his eyes. "What the hell happened?" he croaked.

My career just went up in smoke, General Scheib thought. That's what the hell happened.

Pasadena, California: Olympia Medical Center

Harry was sedated and semiconscious while Anson Aerospace medical personnel helicoptered him from the Mohave test site directly to Olympia Medical Center in Pasadena. He went into surgery the next day, then the recovery unit, and finally into a private room paid for by Anson Aerospace. Although Harry didn't know it at first, a pair of Air Police stood guard outside his room. Later they were replaced by private security people hired by Victor Anson himself.

Sometime during that period of half-wakefulness, an officer in Air Force blue entered Harry's room and shoved an official-looking document at him. "Security agreement," he said, his tone as flat and clipped as an air traffic controller's. "Sign at the bottom line."

"Security?" Harry mumbled, still fuzzy from the sedatives.

"About the accident. It's been classified Secret. You can't say anything about it to anyone who doesn't have a certified need to know." He held the document on a clipboard six inches from Harry's nose and pressed a ballpoint pen into his hand. "Sign it now."

Moving his arm made Harry wince with pain. He scribbled a parody of his signature on the bottom line and the uniformed officer took his clipboard and left Harry to drift back into a drugged sleep.

When Harry awoke fully, on the fifth day after the explosion, he blinked at the almost-luxurious furnishings of the room in which he found himself. Crank-up hospital bed, he saw, but the rest of the room looked like a first-class hotel, rather than a hospital: cool pastel walls, sleek modern furniture, a big flat-screen TV on the wall. The one window looked out on city buildings. Then he realized there was an IV tube in his left arm, and a bank of monitoring instruments softly beeping on the wall above his bed's headboard.

Harry tried to raise himself into a sitting position to see more of the outside surroundings, but his ribs flared with pain. He settled back on the bed and the pain subsided into a dulled ache. They must have me pretty well doped up, he guessed.

The door to his room opened and a nurse stepped in. She was a bit on the chubby side, but she looked cheerful. Smiling.

"We're awake," she said pleasantly.

"Yeah," Harry replied, unhappy with her "we."

"Hungry?"

"No."

"Really?" She came to the bed, peered at the instruments over Harry's head. "You've been getting nothing but intravenous for the past four days."

"How bad was I hurt?"

"A few cracked ribs. Superficial burns on one side of your face. Nothing terribly serious."

She's a professional nurse, Harry thought. Indifferent to the patient's pain.

"The others? How bad--"

She shook her head with a slightly disapproving expression on her dimpled features. "I'll order a breakfast tray for you. See if you can take some nourishment."

Twenty minutes later a Hispanic orderly came in with a tray of breakfast. He cranked Harry's bed up to a sitting position slowly, carefully, obviously aware that the patient's ribs were painful. Harry felt grateful enough to say,
"Gracias."

The dark-skinned orderly grinned at him. "Just doin' my job, man."

Harry sipped the orange juice, poked at the rubbery scrambled eggs. Every time he moved his arms his ribs flared up. By the time he'd given up on the breakfast his body felt as if somebody had spent the morning whacking his chest and back with a baseball bat.

A doctor came in briefly, took his pulse, and told him that he'd be fine in a week or so.

"The others," Harry said. "How bad were they hurt? Pete Quintana?"

The doctor pursed his lips. "I don't know about anyone else. The medevac chopper brought you in five days ago. You're my patient. You're recovering well. That's all I know."

It must be bad, Harry surmised. Pete must be dead. Anybody else?

Harry spent the day watching television, banal soap operas, game shows where he knew the answers that stumped the dumbbell contestants, phony courtrooms with idiotic people complaining about one another, psychologists offering advice to young couples and old married folks.

Maybe Sylvia and I ought to go on one of those shows, Harry thought. Then he remembered the marriage counselor they'd seen and the psychologist he'd gone to afterward and how pointless it had all been.

Where is Sylvia? he wondered. Does she even know I'm in the hospital? Did anybody tell her there's been an accident?

Late in the afternoon Monk Delany came into his room. Harry was glad to see the big, shambling engineer, although he thought Monk looked awkward, sheepish, almost embarrassed.

"How ya doing, Harry?"

"It only hurts when I breathe."

"Come on," Delany said. "Seriously."

"Banged-up ribs. I'll be okay."

"Your face is kinda burned. Like you got too much sun."

Harry nodded. The movement sent a twinge of pain along his back.

"You look okay," he said to Delany.

The engineer pulled one of the petite wooden chairs from the wall and sat down beside Harry's bed. The chair looked almost too frail to hold his bulk.

"I got a couple bruises," Delany said. "The blast knocked me down, that's all." "Pete?"

Delany's face fell. "I told that dumb spic to get his ass inside the blockhouse."

"Is he dead?"

"Yeah."

"Anybody else?"

"Naw, they're all okay. You got it worse than anybody. Except Pete, of course. General Scheib tore out both knees of his pants. Levy got a black eye. A real beaut of a shiner."

Harry knew that Monk was trying to cheer him up. "What caused the explosion? Any idea?"

"Six dozen guys are going over the wreckage, including a gang of blue suits."

"And?"

Delany shrugged. "Looks like it mighta been some grease got into the oxy line."

"We checked that line," Harry said.

"Yeah, I know. But that's what it looks like."

Harry closed his eyes and saw his job going down the drain. Grease in the oxygen line. That shouldn't have happened. Somebody's going to get blamed for it. Me. Maybe all of us. Maybe the whole damned program will get shut down.

"The investigation isn't over," Delany said. "Maybe they'll find something else."

Harry started to shake his head, thought better of it. "What're they going to find? Spies? Foreign agents planted a bomb?"

Delany sat and stared at him in silence for several long moments, his normally cheerful face looking pensive, almost mournful.

At last he got up from the flimsy chair. "Take care of yourself, Harry. I gotta get back out to Mohave, help with the investigation."

"Thanks for coming by, Monk."

"Nothing to it." Delany stopped at the door. "Anything I can get you, Harry? Anything you need?"

"My laptop," Harry answered immediately. "I'll go nuts in here without my laptop to work on."

"You got it, pal."

It wasn't until after Delany had left that Harry wondered when Sylvia would be allowed to visit him. He found that he didn't really care when she came, or if she came at all. And he realized he wasn't surprised by his feeling.