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.”Coggins saw that Jamil slowly shook his head.He knows better, she thought.He knows that if they nuke Honolulu a couple of hundred thousand people will be killed instantly.At least.Higgins turned the discussion to emergency rescue tactics.Coggins opened her minicomputer and, looking toward Higgins all the time, reopened Jamil’s file.He’s a Christian, she saw with a quick flick of her eyes to the tiny screen.His whole family is Christian.That must be why they fled Lebanon and came here.And Higgins thinks he’s an Arab.She smiled to herself.She wondered what General Higgins would think if he knew that Zuri Coggins was a Black Muslim.Maryland Heights, Missouri: Provident Trust BankLinda Suwazi saw her career going down in flames.The baby’s due in four months, she groaned inwardly, and this is gonna get me laid off, for sure.Sitting in front of Linda’s desk, Mrs.Markley radiated cold fury.“You are the branch manager, aren’t you? Why can’t you get the machines fixed?”Mrs.Markley was the seventh customer to barge into her office in the past half hour, complaining that the ATMs were down.Linda had tried to phone the local service company, but she’d gotten nothing but a busy signal.In desperation she had called corporate headquarters in Houston.No use.The line was so jammed with other calls that all she got was an automated message advising her to call again later.“I want access to my money!” Mrs.Markley was hissing.“It’s bad enough that your machines aren’t working, but your tellers refuse to cash my Social Security check!”“Our computers are down,” Linda tried to explain.“It’s only temporary, I’m sure.If you could come back later.”Mrs.Markley rose grandly to her feet, practically twitching with rage.She reminded Linda of a beady-eyed rat.“If you can’t run your bank properly you should be replaced!” Mrs.Markley snapped.Then she swept out of Linda’s office.Linda sank back in her swivel chair and fought down the urge to burst into tears.ABL-1: Laser Bay“You scared, boss?”Startled, Harry half-turned and saw Delany’s big, bearlike form lumbering up the narrow walkway toward him.Harry had slowly worked his way past the lasing cavity and mixing chamber, heading tailward along the tanks that held the liquid oxygen and iodine toward the cramped little monitoring station where Wally Rosenberg sat, checking pressures and tankage levels.“What are you doing back here?” Harry demanded.Monk’s station was up in the nose, at the beam control compartment.“The optics are all okay,” said Delany.“I was just wondering how you guys’re feeling.You nervous about this?”“Nervous? Kind of,” Harry admitted.“Aren’t you?”Delany shrugged.“Why should I be nervous? The gooks are about to start World War III and we’re in the middle of the action.What’s there to be nervous about?”Harry wanted to laugh, but the best he could do was to crack a thin smile.“You checked the optics?” he asked Delany.“Everything’s on the tick.No problems.” “Where’s Taki?”“Up at the battle management console, where she should be.Maybe they’ll give her an Air Force commission if she nails those gook missiles.”Harry knew that he and the other civilians were manning the laser only because this was supposed to be a test flight.We’re only a skeleton crew at best, he thought.When the system’s declared operational, Air Force personnel will take over.With more than twice the number of their five-person team, at that.“Okay,” he said.“I’ll go up forward and see how she’s making out.”Delany gave him that sloppy salute of his.“Aye, aye, skipper.”Harry shook his head.“This isn’t the Navy, Monk.”“We ain’t the Air Force, either.”The COIL’s channel ran through the length of the plane, past the crew compartment and galley, beneath the flight deck and cockpit, and into the bulbous turret that made the plane’s nose look like a potato.Taki Nakamura’s station was up forward, at the electronics consoles that monitored the plane’s sensors and the laser’s output beam.Taki’s battle management compartment was directly beneath the flight deck.Harry scanned the row of consoles, most of them dark and unused until they powered up the laser.The plane’s slight swaying was more noticeable up here near the nose.Like a ship at sea, Harry thought.This big lunk of an airplane must weigh a hundred tons, but it still pitches up and down a little.Nakamura was sitting at the main console, her fingers flicking across the keyboard, her eyes focused intently on the display screen.“Everything okay, Taki?” asked Harry.She looked up at him, her lean, sculpted face utterly serious.“Everything’s in the green, jefe.”Harry nodded to her.He remembered that Pete Quintana was the guy they originally called el jefe, the boss.Harry inherited the title when Anson put him in charge of the team, after Pete was killed.An gel Reyes had even gotten his wife to stitch the title onto some of Harry's T-shirts and coveralls.Victor Anson had never seen it, thank god.There was only one god in heaven, Anson always said, and one head of Anson Aerospace.Yet Anson had never come out to the desert to see the test rig, never even made his way down to the working section of his own company's laboratory in Pasadena.He stayed in his office.People came to him.Harry patted Taki's slim shoulder and moved forward, past the battle management compartment and into the nose of the mammoth airplane.Here was the beam control station, Monk Delany's domain, the business end of the COIL, where megawatts of infrared energy fed through the ball-shaped turret in the plane's nose and lanced out toward the target.The controls for the ranging laser were there, too.Perched in a housing atop the flight deck's hump, the ranger was a smaller carbon dioxide laser that was used like a radar to fix the location of the target and feed that data to the big COIL for the kill.Slaved to the sensors that spotted the missile's hot rocket plume, the smaller laser pinpointed the missile's position and distance.The turret in the plane's nose moved in response to the data from the ranging laser and then, zap! the COIL fired and the missile was destroyed.Harry noticed that the ranging laser's console was not powered up.Idly, he sat at the console and flicked it on.The central screen glowed to life, and the words SYSTEM MALFUNCTION burned themselves onto it.What the hell? Harry thought.System malfunction?"What're you doing, Harry?"He looked up and saw Monk Delany looming over him."Something's wrong with the ranger."Delany leaned over his shoulder and pecked at the console's keyboard, SYSTEM MALFUNCTION glowered at them."Shit," said Delany."You been screwing around with my program?""No, I just turned the console on," Harry said.Mumbling unhappily, Delany nudged Harry out of the seat and took over the console himself.After several moments he shrugged in frustration."Something's wrong," he said."No kidding." Harry knew that without the ranging laser to feed targeting information to the COIL, the whole system was useless."Lemme fiddle with it," Monk said, still looking at Harry as if it were his fault."I'll go check the rig," Harry said."You can't check it while we're in the air," Monk growled.Harry patted his muscular shoulder
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