TWELVE

Eighty-eight dead. No survivors. That thought threatened to swallow Joshua whole.

Somehow he managed to keep his MIT-educated engineer’s brain trained on the task before him. Failure analysis. Why had the RTS system failed on Flight 199?

Then there was the fighter-pilot side of his brain too, never compromising, needing complete command and control, not satisfied with anything less than a fully successful mission.

But the mission had failed. Terribly. So terribly that as Joshua studied the information on the computer screen he had to tell himself not to think about the extended families of those eighty-eight people, the grieving husbands, wives, children, grandchildren. How many? What if each passenger left only two surviving family members behind? That would be nearly one hundred and eighty shattered lives. Heartbroken and weeping. What if each had left three behind … and then again, what difference did a game of numbers make in the face of something so awful? As a military man, Joshua was used to the concept of casualties. He had seen them killed on missions and when things went bad while testing experimental aircraft in the desert.

This was different. These were civilians. When they bought their tickets they hadn’t signed up for the hazards of war. He caught himself. He had to steel himself to the task at hand.

It was now a little before four in the morning, and Joshua had been in his study since receiving Ted’s phone call. His team had sent him a dump of electronic data, and Joshua was scanning it for anomalies. Nothing jumped off the screen. He ran integrated consistency tests, his own software invention to cross-check each RTS unit, but he came up with nothing. He started to dig down into the granular details of each system of the Commercial Flight Return-to-Sender Laser Defense Unit that he and his group had adapted from the original RTS design plan in order to arm civilian aircraft.

At this point Ted and Carolyn who was the chief of weapon physics hooked up with Joshua on a conference call. They double-checked everything on the final production protocol, item by item. The digital circuits, in case there had been an electrical failure. The digital logic design. Even the schematics for the diode array inside the laser. Then the onboard computer settings. The data-capturing directorate inside the laser, which commanded the laser beam to copy the signal inside the guidance system of the incoming missile. And the mirror-reverse command, which would instantaneously load the opposite trajectory into that enemy guidance system. All of the functions that were designed to operate while the approaching missile was traveling more than a thousand miles an hour. Those systems were all checked, and they should have worked — all of them.

After several hours on the telephone, Carolyn spoke up. Besides Joshua, she was the one most responsible for the overall operating principals behind the RTS. She was known for her bluntness. “We’re chasing our tails.”

Joshua dismissed that. “No, we’re missing something here. We have to stay on this until we find it.”

Carolyn wouldn’t budge. “Josh, just hear me out. We’re working with half the picture until we find out what the black box says and what the voice recorder picked up in the moments before the plane exploded. Till then we’re just working blind.”

Ted the diplomat, intervened. “I think she’s saying it’s not logical to start on the premise that the RTS failed, that it was a production defect or design flaw. Maybe it’s something else — ”

Joshua cut in. “Like what? Like maybe a flock of birds hit the engines?”

Carolyn said, “Come on, Josh.”

“No, you come on. Both of you. We can’t look for the easy way out. Eighty-eight people dead — that’s the body count. We need to find out why. You’re saying we should assume pilot error in firing the RTS? Is that what you’re saying? I don’t think so …”

“We’re not saying that,” Ted countered. “Just that I was with you, remember? At the White Sands missile-test range when we ran through the commercial jet RTS tests. Ten out of ten. Perfect scores all the way around. Then the tests by the Defense Advanced Research Agency and the Missile and Space Intelligence Center. No glitches. The RTS took everything the Pentagon could throw at it.”

Carolyn broke in again. “You know what’s going to happen, right? The other defense companies with their lasers, the traditional ones that act simply as blunt-force weapons, blasting things out of the air, that sort of thing, are going to tell the Pentagon to dump us and start working with their lasers. They’ll say the RTS comes with too much risk. And the politics behind this … you have to admit, Josh, we’ve been working in a political cyclone ever since the North Korean thing. Sure, RTS worked during that crisis last year, saved New York from the incoming North Korean nukes. But Congress and the press — they treated us like Nazis, for crying out loud.”

“We’re off track,” Joshua said.

But Ted needed to counter something else. “Listen, Carolyn, your point about the blunt-force kind of lasers … we all know why they don’t work well: too heavy, too bulky. They have to intercept at too close a range. And if they miss the target, they blow up some innocent plane. The solid-state ones are still lacking, and the chemically energized lasers are like elephants. But the RTS is like a cheetah, except it’s got the IQ of Einstein. Let’s keep reminding ourselves what your RTS laser defense, Joshua, has achieved. It doesn’t blast missiles out of the sky, which is still too hard to do accurately. Instead it captures data from a guidance system and recalibrates it with the speed of light. That’s revolutionary. Anyway, let’s keep an open mind … maybe, like Carolyn says, our assumptions are all wrong. Maybe it wasn’t installed properly.”

“Our staff supervised the installations on the commercial jets.”

“Then maybe another factor?”

“Look, people,” Joshua said with fatigue in his voice, “we have to face the possibility that we screwed up. And now there’s a death toll.”

“I’m not ready to take the rap for that,” Carolyn bulleted back, “not until we know every fact — and we’re far from that right now. And one more thing …”

Joshua asked, “What?”

“Like Ted says, our RTS is the best thing we’ve got to protect Americans from offensive missiles. The best. Period. Start doubting that, and more Americans are going to die.”

There was a knock on the door of Joshua’s study. Joshua put Ted and Carolyn on hold. Abigail was there in the doorway in her pajamas.

“Just wanted to see how you’re doing.”

“Not good. You should be asleep.”

“Are you kidding? Ted told me a few things when he called, so I have a pretty good idea about what’s going on and what’s in your head right now.”

Joshua snapped back, sharper than he should have, “So it’s Abby the mind reader?”

“On this I am. You’re shouldering the responsibility for the deaths of all those people on the Chicago flight. It was a horrible thing, but you can’t put this on yourself.”

“And why not?”

“Because it’s too early in the investigation to start taking blame.”

“Why is everyone trying to get me to shirk this thing?”

“No one’s doing that.”

“Sure you are. And Ted and Carolyn too. I’m the only one willing to admit failure.”

“Or maybe …,” Abigail started to say.

“What?”

Abigail’s eyes flashed. “Maybe it’s your maddening perfectionism, Josh, your obsession. Whether it’s missile defense or your children or — ”

“This isn’t about me.”

“I think it is. You’re too quick to beat yourself up. You’re a glutton for punishment over this RTS thing …”

Joshua shook his head.

Abigail bowed hers. “Sorry. That was a rotten thing to say.”

After a few moments of silence, Joshua said, “I’ve got to get back to my conference call. I’m flying out early tomorrow, back to the office. The jet’s ready.”

“Cal’s going to be disappointed. He’s arriving tomorrow afternoon.”

“He’ll understand.”

“He said he had something to tell you.”

“Whatever it is, it’ll have to wait.” Then Joshua softened. “Look, tell him we’ll definitely talk, okay?”

Then Joshua thought of something. “Did Ethan March stay overnight?”

“Yes. I put him in the guest wing. That all right?”

“Fine.”

“Speaking of New York, I didn’t tell you …”

“What?”

“Got a letter from Pastor Campbell. It was a thank-you for the gift I sent from both of us, the one for the Eternity Church inner-city project. He said he was looking forward to another round of golf with you, you know, when you’re back in the city.”

Joshua didn’t answer. Golf seemed absurdly irrelevant at the moment.

“Okay, I’ll leave you alone.” As she was about to leave, she added, “I’m just thankful we have our daughter, considering what could have happened.”

Joshua nodded. He was embarrassed that his RTS analysis had distracted him from the fact that Deborah was safe and sound … thanks to Ethan.

But when Joshua looked back to where Abigail had been standing, she was gone, and the door was closed.