Able One Read Free Page A

Bachelor Officers quarters, Harry had checked the route from the BOQ to the mess hall and put it into his cell phone’s memory. Now he pulled the phone from his pants pocket to orient himself.
    Damn! The phone was dead. No, he saw, it was getting power from the battery. But the screen said NO CONNECTION.
    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.
    Make it work, Harry, Victor Anson had told him. The company’s ass is on the line.
     
    Sunshine Airways Flight 19
    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
    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,