Able One Read online

  “Still…”

  “It’s not Angel.”

  “That leaves the big guy.”

  “Monk.”

  “Has he come into some extra money recently?”

  Harry leaned back tiredly in the bucket seat. The plane was still shuddering, but the shaking didn’t seem to be getting worse.

  “Are we going to make it to Japan?” he asked.

  Colonel Christopher smiled tightly. “If I have to get out and push.”

  Harry smiled weakly.

  “Now what about this Monk guy? Has he been flashing some extra money around lately? Bought a new house maybe?”

  Shaking his head, Harry replied, “Hell, Monk’s been living in the same dinky bungalow since I’ve known him. Hasn’t bought a new car in years, drives a beat-up old Chrysler…”

  His voice tailed off. Harry remembered that Monk’s wife had bought herself a Mustang convertible. Fire-engine red. Or had Monk bought it for her?

  Madelaine worked for Anson, Harry recalled, in the human resources department.

  “What is it, Mr. Hartunian?” Colonel Christopher prodded.

  He blinked at her. “It’s probably nothing.” He pushed himself up from the seat. “Let me talk to Monk.”

  Christopher got to her feet beside him. “It’s him?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not. Let me talk to him before we go jumping to conclusions.”

  She studied his face for an intense moment, then nodded. “Okay. You do that. I’ve got a plane to fly.”

  As she stepped back into the cockpit, Karen Christopher saw that Captain O’Banion’s shirt was dark with perspiration as he sat in the left-hand seat. Even though his hands were in his lap, they were balled tightly into fists. Kaufman was doing the flying, she saw, and the communications officer was clearly afraid to touch the controls.

  O’Banion looked relieved as Colonel Christopher leaned between the two seats.

  “How’s it going, Obie?” she asked pleasantly.

  “She’s flying straight and level,” said the copilot, glancing up at her. “Buffeting a lot, but she’s holding together.”

  “Good. Captain, you can go back to your comm station. Thanks for keeping the major company.”

  O’Banion pushed himself out of the chair. “You’re entirely welcome, ma’am.”

  “How’d you like sitting up here?” Christopher asked as she slipped by him and into the seat. It felt warm, hot almost.

  “Makes me think of W. C. Fields,” O’Banion replied.

  “The old comedian? How come?”

  “He said he wanted on his tombstone, ‘All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.’ ”

  Christopher laughed. “You don’t want to be a pilot?”

  “No, ma’am. You can keep the job. I’ll stick to communications.”

  O’Banion ducked through the hatch.

  As Colonel Christopher strapped in, she said to Kaufman, “No competition from him.”

  Kaufman grunted. Christopher could see that he was reluctant to turn control of the plane back to her.

  Looking through the windshield, the colonel saw that they were back over the gray swirling storm that they had passed on the way to the Korean coast.

  “Hope we don’t have to put down in that mess,” she said lightly.

  Kaufman gave her a sour look. “Misawa reports it’s starting to rain there. We’ll be landing in the storm, looks like.”

  Christopher shrugged. “Not much we can do about that—unless you want to head back to Elmendorf.”

  Kaufman said nothing, but the expression on his face could have curdled milk.

  ABL-1: Beam Control Compartment

  Monk Delany was asleep when Harry stepped through the hatch to the beam control compartment. He was sitting in front of his main console, head lolling on his shoulder as the plane bounced and staggered through the air. Up here in the 747’s nose, the constant rise and fall of the plane was more noticeable than farther aft. The noise of the engines wasn’t as bad, but the shaking and shuddering caused by the damaged wing seemed more intense up here.

  “Monk,” he called. “Hey, Monk. Wake up.”

  Delany stirred and grumbled to himself. His eyes fluttered, then opened fully.

  “Harry,” he said blearily. “Musta dozed off.”

  “Yeah.” Harry sat in the chair next to the big engineer. “Monk, when we get back to Elmendorf, the Air Force police are going to dust that optics assembly for fingerprints.”

  Delany shrugged. “My prints’ll be all over it. Hell, you know that, Harry.”

  “Yeah. Your prints and nobody else’s.”

  “So whoever took it wore gloves.”

  “They’ll search the plane. And each one of us. They won’t find any gloves.”

  Delany’s face clouded over. “What’re you telling me, Harry?”

  “You took the lens assembly out of the ranger, Monk. Last night. You wormed your big ape arm into the housing and popped it out, nice and neat. Just the way you popped the replacement set into it.”

  Glaring at Harry, Delany looked as if he wanted to answer but thought better of it.

  “It was you, Monk,” Harry said quietly. “I know it was you.”

  The big man’s eyes narrowed. For an instant Harry thought Delany was going to get violent. But then he put on his lopsided smile and said, “What the hell, Harry?”

  “You’re not denying it?”

  “I didn’t do any damage. We shot down the gook missiles, didn’t we? We’re all heroes.”

  “Yeah. All of us—except Pete Quintana.”

  Delany look startled. “What’s he got to do with this?”

  “How’d the grease get into the oxygen line, Monk?”

  “Now wait a minute!”

  “You put it there,” Harry insisted. “You knew what would happen when the line was pressurized. You killed Pete.”

  “Dumb spic shouldn’t’ve been out there. He shoulda come into the control room with the rest of us.”

  “You let him get killed.”

  “I warned him!” Delany shouted. “I told the dumb sonofabitch to get inside! You heard me!”

  “You didn’t tell him the COIL was going to explode. You didn’t tell me to stop the test.”

  “Tell you fuck! Who the hell are you? Chief of the test team! Why you, big shit? It shoulda been me!”

  Harry felt the fury radiating from the big man. “I know,” he said softly. “I told you so when Anson picked me.”

  “Anson! Big fucking asshole! You know why he picked you? Because he can push you around. He calls the tune and you do the dance.”

  “And Pete burns to death.”

  Delany jumped up out of his seat, making Harry twitch with surprise and sudden fear. Monk’s a big guy, Harry thought, remembering the way the big guys at school had always run roughshod over him. He’d learned to talk his way out of most trouble, but there were always gorillas who took special pleasure in beating up smaller guys who got As in class.

  “So Pete’s dead,” Delany roared. “Whattaya want me to do about it? I didn’t kill him! Damned brown-nosing spic had to show Levy and Scheib how good he was, how fucking concerned he was about getting every fucking detail just right! So he killed himself. I didn’t do it!”

  Slowly, Harry rose to his feet. He barely reached to Monk’s nose.

  “I know you didn’t intend to kill him,” Harry said, trying to placate Monk.

  “Fucking right I didn’t!” Looming over Harry, Delany growled, “And you’re not going to say a word about this, buddy. Not to anybody. Understand?”

  Before he could think of anything else to say, Harry heard himself reply, “Monk, I can’t keep this quiet. The colonel knows about the ranging laser.”

  “So what? That’s all been fixed. No damage done.”

  “We’ve got to know why you did it. Who paid you to do it.”

  Delany slammed a big fist against the main console, making Harry flinch backward a step
. “Dammit, Harry, you don’t hafta know anything! Not a damned thing! You got that?”

  “Yes I do, Monk. But the Air Force will want to know. Mr. Anson will want to know. Pete’s widow, too.”

  “Harry, I’m warning you! Drop it!”

  “I wish I could, Monk.”

  “But I can’t.”

  Whirling, Harry saw Colonel Christopher standing in the compartment’s hatch. Monk stared at her, frozen, his mouth open, his hands balled into fists.

  “From what Harry tells me, you’ll be charged with negligent homicide, I imagine,” the colonel said, her voice tight, her face hard and unforgiving.

  “Now wait—” Harry began. He never got any further.

  Delany gave out a strangled roar and grabbed Harry with one big hand, punched him squarely in the face with the other. Harry’s head snapped back. His nose spurted blood. He tried to push himself away, but Monk kept punching him.

  Colonel Christopher sprang at Delany, kicked him in the knee, and chopped at the side of his bull neck. Monk dropped Harry and turned on her, but she ducked under his wild swing and deftly rammed a fist into his chest. A smaller man would have gone down, but Delany just grunted and reached for her.

  Through a world of pain Harry saw the colonel jabbing at Monk’s eyes. Staggering to his feet, he punched with all his might at Monk’s side. Kidney punch, strictly illegal in boxing but the best defense Harry knew when being beaten up by a bigger guy.

  Monk yowled and twisted backward. Colonel Christopher chopped with the side of her hand at Delany’s throat and the big man went down, gasping and floundering on the deck of the narrow compartment.

  As Harry sank to his knees he saw another Air Force officer stepping through the hatch, the redheaded captain. No need, he thought. No need for reinforcements. He saw Colonel Christopher standing over Monk’s prostrate body like an Amazon warrior, her eyes blazing, every line of her face and body daring Monk to try to get up again.

  Georgetown, D.C.: The Scheib Residence

  It was a three-story row house on O Street, narrow but deep. Like all the houses on that block it had a flight of concrete steps leading up to the front door, a basement garage, and a lushly flowering garden in back tended by a small army of brown-skinned immigrant workers. Its exterior differed from its neighbors only by the startling abstract mural that the lady of the house had lovingly painted—to the clucking disapproval of some of her neighbors.

  Bradley Scheib’s den was on the top floor, insulated from the guest bedroom suite by soundproofed walls. General Scheib was sitting in his oversized recliner chair, a tumbler of single-malt scotch, neat, on the walnut table beside him, his private telephone held to his ear. The phone’s landline tapped directly into the Department of Defense’s shielded line that ran beneath the District of Columbia’s streets, connecting the White House and the Capitol building with the Pentagon, across the Potomac.

  The only light in the room came from the computer screen on the desk, over in the corner. Brad Scheib sat in the shadows, bone-tired, emotionally spent, feeling ragged. He had torn off his uniform the moment he’d arrived home from the Pentagon and put on a comfortable old sweatshirt and baggy gym pants. He’d nodded hello to his wife and bounded up the stairs to his sanctum sanctorum.

  “I gave you the priority code,” he growled into the phone. “What more authorization do you need?”

  “Sorry, sir,” came the voice of the harried operator in the Pentagon. “Circuits have been overloaded all day.”

  “I don’t care! Get me through to that plane! That’s an order!”

  “Yes, sir. I’m trying, sir.”

  The door swung open, spilling light from the hallway into the darkened room. Scheib’s wife stood framed in the doorway, wearing a floor-length flowered silk robe: lean, curvaceous, a tribute to relentless exercise and cosmetic surgery.

  Angrily, he said, “Do I have to put a lock on my door? You know this is private territory. You can’t—”

  “I’m not going to steal any military secrets from you, Brad,” answered Carlotta Harriman Scheib coolly. “I’m quite sure your call is personal. Isn’t it?”

  Cupping one hand over the phone’s receiver, Scheib said, “Whatever it is, it’s none of your business.”

  “Calling your little slut of a colonel?” Carla asked, smiling coldly. “Do you make her stand at attention for you? No, I imagine it’s you who stands at attention when you’re with her, isn’t it?”

  “You’ve done enough damage to her career,” Scheib snapped, nearly snarling.

  “So what? There are plenty of other women panting after you. I could set you up with a couple of the dewy-eyed twits you met at my birthday party. They’d love to flop into bed with you.”

  “Carla, this is Air Force business.”

  “Of course it is.”

  “For god’s sake, we nearly went to war today!”

  “So now you’re a hero.”

  “No, but she is.”

  Carlotta’s face contracted into a puzzled frown.

  Suddenly understanding the reality of it, Scheib grinned maliciously as he told his wife, “That’s right, she’s a hero now. Thanks to you, she was in the right spot at the right time to shoot down a pair of ballistic missiles that were launched at us. What do you think of that?”

  She started to reply, but hesitated, then snapped her mouth shut, spun around, and disappeared down the hall, leaving the door open. Scheib could hear the clop-clop of her high-heeled slippers going down the stairs.

  He put the phone down next to his scotch and swiftly went to the door, closed it firmly, then returned to his recliner.

  “Well?” he demanded.

  “I’m still trying, sir.”

  “Where’d you learn to fight like that?” Harry asked. His voice sounded funny to him because his nose was stuffed with cotton batting.

  They were in the galley. Lieutenant Sharmon was leaning over Harry, dabbing a pad soaked in rubbing alcohol over the bloodstains on his face. The plane lurched and the first-aid kit sitting on the next seat slid to the deck with a clatter. Harry barely missed getting the pad shoved into his eye.

  “Sorry,” the lieutenant said.

  Colonel Christopher stood behind Sharmon, watching the first-aid work closely.

  “Four older brothers,” she answered Harry’s question. “And self-defense classes at the Academy.”

  “You’re a terror,” Harry said.

  “That wasn’t a love tap you hit Delany with,” Christopher replied, grinning.

  “Kidney punch. Learned that at good old Medford High.”

  “Must’ve been a great school.”

  Harry chuckled despite the pain from his nose. “We had a pretty good football team. But winning the game wasn’t as important as winning the fight after the game.”

  Lieutenant Sharmon stooped to pick up the first-aid kit, “For what it’s worth,” he said, inspecting his handiwork, “I don’t think your nose is broken. You’re gonna have a pair of beautiful shiners, though.”

  “Thanks.” Harry sighed.

  Colonel Christopher shook her head slightly, then said, “I’d better get back to the cockpit. Weather’s getting thicker. Jon, you’ll have to get back, too.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said the lieutenant, shutting the first-aid kit’s lid with a click.

  Harry asked, “Where’d you put Monk?”

  “Locked him in the forward lav,” said the colonel. “Your people helped drag him in there.”

  “What’s going to happen to him?”

  She shrugged. “That’s up to the AG’s people, I suppose. And your own corporate execs. From what you said, he killed somebody?”

  “That was an accident.” But Harry knew it was more than that. “I mean, he didn’t intend to kill Pete. He just—”

  The plane lurched again, much worse. Sharmon staggered against the bulkhead, Colonel Christopher grabbed at him for support.

  “I’d better get to the cockpit,” Christopher said
. Silently she added, Before Obie wets himself.

  O’Banion had both hands on the control yoke as he tried to help Major Kaufman keep ABL-1 flying steadily. Christopher could see the dark, swirling clouds of the storm below them, smothering the view from horizon to horizon.

  “Thank you, Captain,” she said to O’Banion. As the captain got up gratefully and she slid into the pilot’s seat, Christopher said to Kaufman, “Sorry to be away so long, Obie. We had a bit of a ruckus downstairs.”

  “Hasn’t been a tea party up here,” Kaufman muttered.

  The plane was buffeting worse than ever as it plowed ahead on its three remaining engines. Colonel Christopher put on her heavy flight helmet and plugged in her communications line.

  “Jon, I need an ETA for Misawa,” she said into her lip mike.

  “Lieutenant Sharmon’s still downstairs, ma’am,” O’Banion’s voice replied in her earphone.

  “Get him up here,” she commanded.

  “We got a shi… a big load of messages piled up, Colonel,” O’Banion said. “Including a top priority from Washington. General Scheib.”

  “Give me that one first.”

  Some stranger’s voice, a woman, asked, “Colonel Christopher?”

  “Right.”

  “General Scheib, I have Colonel Christopher for you.”

  “Karen?” Brad’s voice. “General,” she replied.

  In his darkened den, Brad Scheib heard the stiffness in Karen’s voice. She’s not alone, he understood. She’s in the cockpit of that plane with the rest of the goddamned crew tapped in.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “We’re approaching Misawa.” Karen’s voice sounded cool, totally under control. “One engine out, wing damaged, but we’re maintaining altitude and airspeed.”

  “You’ll make it to Misawa? Met reports there’s a storm over the area.”

  A hesitation. Then she answered, “We’ll make it, General.”

  “Good.”

  Silence, except for hissing static. What can I say? Scheib asked himself. What can I tell her with the rest of her crew listening in? Even if she tells them to stay off the line there’s no guarantee that they won’t eavesdrop. Hell, half the Pentagon could be listening to us. And it’ll all get recorded, too.