Able One (4 page)

But as she looked up at Sharmon’s young face and troubled, red-rimmed eyes, Colonel Christopher said to herself, It’s not his fault. The brass assigned him to me and he’s stuck with the job. Just like I’m stuck with driving this clunker of an airplane.

“Take it easy, Lieutenant,” she said, trying to put some warmth into it. She extended her hand. “Welcome on board.”

Sharmon loosened up a little. “Thanks, Colonel,” he mumbled.

Christopher perched on the edge of the desk and gestured to the chair against the wall. “Have a seat. Relax.”

The lieutenant settled into the chair like a carpenter’s ruler folding up, big hands on his knees.

“I bet you played basketball,” Colonel Christopher said, trying to smile.

“No, ma’am. Track. Ran the distance events.”

Her brows rose. “Marathon?”

Shannon smiled for the first time. It was a good, bright smile. “Did the marathon once. Once was enough.”

She laughed. “Well, what we’re doing here is easier than a marathon.” “Racetrack, they told me.”

Nodding. “That’s right. We take the bird out to a designated test area over the ocean, then fly a figure eight while the tech geniuses downstairs get their laser working. Piece of cake.”

But in her mind she was thinking of the missions she had flown over Afghanistan: twelve-thousand-kilometer distances, midair refuelings, full stealth mode, pinpoint delivery of smart bombs. Going from flying a B-2 to jockeying a dumbass 747 was more than a demotion, it was a humiliation.

“So there’s not much for me to do, then,” Lieutenant Sharmon said.

Christopher nodded. “Not as long as the GPS is working.”

Fargo, North Dakota: KXND-TV

“Whattaya mean there’s no satellite pictures?” Heydon Kalheimer demanded indignantly. He was standing in front of the studio’s blue wall, due to be on the air with the weather report in forty seconds. As usual, he had shown up at the last possible moment. The monitor screen that usually showed the National Weather Service satellite imagery was as blank as the wall. Kalheimer felt very put out.

His producer shrugged her heavy shoulders. They made quite a pair: Kalheimer was long and lanky, all arms and legs, even his head was narrow and long-jawed. He always had a slap-happy grin on his face, even when he was furious. The producer was built like a squat teddy bear, short, heavy, given to sighs of long suffering.

She sighed in her long-suffering way, then repeated, “No satellite pictures. Something’s screwed up. News reports say that all the satellites are down, malfunctioning.”

“How in hell am I supposed to do the weather without satellite graphics? What’m I supposed to do, just stand in front of the camera and look stupid?”

“That wouldn’t take much,” the producer muttered.

“What?”

Louder, she said, “You’ll have the local radar imagery and the National Weather Service’s forecast. Just read it off the monitor, like you always do.”

“That’ll take ten seconds. What do I do with the rest of my two minutes?”

“You’ll just have to wing it.” She knew that Kalheimer did not like winging it. Behind his facade of overweening self-confidence he was still as insecure as he’d been his first day in front of the cameras.

“Heads are gonna roll over this,” Kalheimer growled. “And your head’s gonna be the first one!”

“In five!” the floor manager shouted. “Four ... three ...”

The overhead lights turned on and Kalheimer turned to camera one, his toothy professional grin spread across his long, bony face.

“Hi there! It’s time for your up-to-the-minute weather report.”

The Pentagon: Situation Room

The first meeting of this emergency action team is convened”--General Franklin P. Higgins glanced at his Breitling wristwatch-- “at 11:46 a.m., 23 October.”

The situation room was in the basement of the Pentagon, in the wing that had been rebuilt after being blasted and burned by the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. It was a small room; it felt crowded, tense, even with fewer than a dozen men and women sitting around the oblong table. Almost every one of them had opened a laptop or notebook computer on the table before them.

Three of the room’s walls were floor-to-ceiling smart screens, showing various images from hardened Defense Department satellites. The ceiling was paneled with glareless lights. The seats around the highly polished table were dark leather, plush, comfortable. Each place at the table had a built-in phone jack and power plug.

General Higgins was a big, morose-looking man with a flabby-jowled face and a bulbous nose that had earned him the nickname Possum when he’d been a cadet at the Air Force Academy. Although he was presently on detached duty with the Defense Intelligence Agency, he still wore his blue uniform.

Zuri Coggins sat at the general’s right hand. She was from the White House, a member of the National Security Advisor’s staff, sent to this emergency action team as the West Wing’s representative. She was a tiny African-American woman, almost elfin, but very intense. Wearing a stylish short-skirted red jacket dress, she was the only woman in the conference room.

The rear door opened and Michael Jamil stepped in, looking apologetic. All eyes around the oblong conference table turned to him.

“Sorry to be late,” he said, his voice soft, contrite. “They held me up at the security checkpoint outside.”

Jamil, a civilian analyst from the National Intelligence Council, was in a suede sports jacket and baggy, creaseless chinos. No tie, but a sleeveless V-neck yellow sweater beneath the jacket. He slid into an empty seat at the foot of the conference table, glancing at the displays on the smart screens that lined three of the room’s four walls. The images showed a satellite view of the missile launching site in the rugged mountains of North Korea, an electronic map of the North Pacific Ocean with each U.S. Navy surface vessel and submarine highlighted by a pinpoint light, and other satellite pictures of Air Force bases in Alaska, Okinawa, and Japan.

Jamil was of medium height, spare of build, his face fringed with a neatly trimmed light brown beard. His skin was the color of tobacco leaf, although he had never smoked in his life. He brushed at a lock of sandy hair that stubbornly fell across his high forehead and nervously adjusted his tinted eyeglasses. His eyes were caramel brown. He felt very junior to this assemblage of uniformed brass and high-powered civilians, even though he was convinced that he knew more about the situation than most of them did.

“Are we all here now?” General Higgins asked, his tone biting, his fleshy face clearly displeased.

His aide, an Air Force major sitting on his left, replied, “The representative from the Chief of Naval Operations is on his way, sir. And the chief of the Homeland Security office at Honolulu was going to attend via a satellite link, but the link isn’t operative this morning.”

Higgins grumbled, “Which is why we’re here, isn’t it?”

Zuri Coggins said, “The President and the National Security Advisor have both instructed me to assure you that any and all resources you may need will be made available.” She peered down the table toward Major General Bradley Scheib.

Brad Scheib gave the impression of being a dashing sky warrior in his crisp blue uniform with its chest full of ribbons, and his handsome, chiseled features. In reality he was more of a tech geek than a jet jock. A graduate of Caltech, Scheib had spent more of his career in laboratories than cockpits.

“What about it, Brad?” General Higgins asked. “Is your missile defense system up and running?”

With a curt nod, Scheib answered, “We’ve activated all our ABM units in Fort Greely, in Alaska, and at Vandenberg Air Force Base. The Navy has alerted all four of its Aegis battle groups in the western Pacific. Two of them are steaming at full speed for the Sea of Japan; the other two are deploying between Japan and Hawaii.”

“There’s only two missiles to worry about,” one of the civilians on the other side of the table said, pointing to the satellite image of the North Korean launch site.

“Two that we know about,” Scheib replied.

“How many do the Chinese have?” an Army officer asked.

“And the Russians?”

“They both have missile-launching submarines, too.”

Zuri Coggins said, “The President has decided that our moves will be strictly defensive.” Poking at the air with one finger to emphasize her words, she added, “We will not do anything that could provoke a Chinese response. Or a Russian one.”

“But they’ve both gone on alert, haven’t they?” asked the admiral sitting across the table from her.

“Not yet,” Coggins replied, “although the State Department was tasked with informing them that our own nuclear retaliatory forces are being placed on full alert.”

“State Department,” the admiral muttered distastefully.

General Higgins looked toward one of the civilians sitting down the table from Coggins. “Are our snooper satellites still working?”

“They are,” said the civilian. “ELINT birds have picked up coded messages sent along landlines in China and Russia.” Glancing at Coggins, he continued. “They are in the process of putting their missile forces on full alert.”

Higgins nodded morosely, as if he had expected nothing less.

“Pakistan and India, too,” the civilian added.

“Sweet Jesus,” said the admiral. “That’s all we need, those two pulling the trigger.”

“What about the Iranians?” Higgins asked.

“They’ve only got a half dozen missiles.”

“Guess where they’ll fire them?” asked Higgins’ aide, who was Jewish.

“What if the Chinese or the Russians take advantage of this situation to attack us?” Higgins snapped.

Coggins replied firmly, “That will trigger a fullscale retaliation by our missile forces and both the Chinese and Russians know it. What’s more, they know that our systems are on full alert. We could respond with a devastating nuclear counterstrike at a moment’s notice.”

“Even if the President is dead?” Jamil asked. His voice was soft, tentative, as if he’d surprised himself by speaking up.

Everyone turned to him. Her dark eyes narrowing, Coggins demanded, “What do you mean by that?”

Suddenly the focus of everyone around the table, Jamil blinked his brown eyes nervously and pawed at his unruly hair. At last he said, “Well, the President is scheduled to give a speech in San Francisco tonight.”

General Scheib pointed to the wall screen with one hand as he pecked with a single finger at his laptop’s keyboard. A schematic drawing of a ballistic missile appeared on the screen, with a list of performance specifications alongside it.

“Those two missiles are Taepodong-2s,” Scheib said. “They don’t have the range to reach San Francisco. Or the reliability. The last time they fired one it splashed into the Pacific several hundred miles short of Hawaii.”

Jamil had to turn in his chair to see the drawing. “According to our information,” he said, “the Taepodong-2 has a range of ten thousand kilometers.”

“That’s Pyongyang propaganda. In the real world, the Taepodong-2 doesn’t have the range to reach San Francisco.”

“I admit that San Francisco is at the extreme fringe of the missile’s capability.” Jamil’s tone was conciliatory, yet he was clearly contradicting the general.

Scheib glared at the civilian analyst. “Even so, the missile doesn’t have the accuracy to hit San Francisco, not at that range.”

Jamil nodded slightly but countered, “Yet they launched a bird into geosynchronous orbit. General, I submit that their guidance system has demonstrated a sophisticated degree of accuracy.”

“You can submit whatever you want,” Scheib retorted with a humorless grin. “They can’t reach San Francisco.”

General Higgins pointed down the table at Jamil. “Are you saying those two missiles
could
hit San Francisco?”

“It’s within the realm of possibility,” Jamil replied.

Shaking his head vigorously, General Scheib insisted, “They’re Taepodong-2s! They don’t have the range. Or the accuracy.”

“Then how did they get a nuclear warhead all the way up to geosynch orbit?” Jamil asked. “If you do the math, you can see that they do indeed have the capability.”

“For Chrissakes, we can
see
the missiles on their pads,” Scheib retorted. “We can count the solid rocket units they’ve strapped onto their first stages. They don’t have the range to reach San Francisco.”

“But if you do the math--”

“Screw the math,” Scheib snapped. “We’ve got satellite imagery.”

Zuri Coggins looked from Scheib to Jamil. “Do you seriously believe that those missiles could hit San Francisco?”

“It’s theoretically possible, if their payloads are light enough.”

“How light?” General Higgins asked.

Jamil hesitated. “Well, according to our estimates, they could each carry a two-hundred-and-fifty-kiloton weapon over the distance to San Francisco.”

“That’s half a megaton between the two of them.”

“Twenty-five times more than Hiroshima.”

“More like thirty.”

“What makes you think that’s going to be their target?” Higgins demanded.

Jamil was unaccustomed to being in the spotlight. And unhappy with it. He had done his analysis in the taxi on his way to the Pentagon, using his iPhone’s calculator application, plus a lot of figures he’d pulled from his own memory. It was shaky, but it made sense to him.

“Whoever launched the first missile wanted to wipe out our satellites. They must understand that the North Korean army is rushing to their site as fast as they can. Yet they haven’t launched the other two missiles they’ve got on their pads. Why not?”

“Because they’re waiting for the President to arrive in San Francisco?” Coggins asked.

Jamil nodded. “That’s my conclusion.”

“Bullshit!” Scheib scoffed.

But Coggins asked, “Why would they do this? What do they hope to gain?”

“It’s the Sarajevo scenario,” Jamil replied. “We’ve run the analysis dozens of times back at Langley.”

“Sarajevo?”

“It’s how World War I started. Some Austrian archduke got assassinated in Sarajevo, in Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. Russia had a treaty with Serbia, so they declared war on Austria-Hungary. Germany had an alliance with Austria-Hungary so they declared war on Russia. England and France had an alliance with Russia so . . .” Jamil spread his hands. “World War I.”