Bad Luck and Trouble

sensitive. We’ve got about a two-year window in which our surface-to-air capability will be completely unbeatable. For about two years anyone using Little Wing will be able to shoot down anything that flies. Maybe longer. It depends how fast people are with new countermeasures.”
    Reacher said, “The speed will make countermeasures difficult.”
    “Almost impossible,” Bond said. “Human reaction times will be too slow. So defenses will have to be automated. Which means we’ll have to trust computers to tell the difference between a bird a hundred yards up and Little Wing a mile up and a satellite fifty miles up. Potentially it will be chaos. Civilian airlines will want protection, obviously, because of terrorism worries. But the skies above civilian airports are thick with stacked planes. False deployment would be the norm, not the exception. So they’d have to turn off their protection for takeoff and landing, which makes them totally vulnerable just when they can’t afford to be.”
    “A can of worms,” Dixon said.
    “But a theoretical can of worms,” O’Donnell said. “We understand Little Wing isn’t working very well.”
    “This can go no further,” Bond said.
    “We already agreed.”
    “Because these are commercial secrets now.”
    “Much more important than defense secrets.”
    “The prototypes were fine,” Bond said. “The beta testing was excellent. But they ran into problems with production.”
    “Rockets or electronics or both?”
    “Electronics,” Bond said. “The rocket technology is more than forty years old. They can do the rocket production in their sleep. That happens up in Denver, Colorado. It’s the electronics packs that are giving them the problems. Down here in LA. They haven’t even started mass production yet. They’re still doing bench assembly. Now even that is screwed up.”
    Reacher nodded and said nothing. He stared out the window for a moment and then took a stack of napkins out of the dispenser and fanned them out and then butted them back together into a neat pile. Weighted them down with the sugar container. The restaurant had pretty much emptied out. There were two guys alone in separate booths at the far end of the room. Landscape workers, tired and hunched. Apart from them, no business. Outside on the street the afternoon light was fading. The red and yellow neon from the restaurant’s huge sign was becoming comparatively brighter and brighter. Some passing cars on the boulevard already had their headlights on.
    “So Little Wing is the same old same old, really,” O’Donnell said, in the silence. “A Pentagon pipe dream that does nothing but burn dollars.”
    Diana Bond said, “It wasn’t supposed to be like that.”
    “It never is.”
    “It’s not a total failure. Some of the units work.”
    “They said the same thing about the M16 rifle. Which was a real comfort when you were out on patrol with one.”
    “But the M16 was perfected eventually. Little Wing will be, too. And it will be worth waiting for. You know which is the world’s best-protected airplane?”
    Dixon said, “Air Force One, probably. Politicians’ asses always come first.”
    Bond said, “Little Wing could take it out without breaking a sweat.”
    “Bring it on,” O’Donnell said. “Easier than voting.”
    “You should read the Patriot Act. You could be arrested for even thinking that.”
    “Jails aren’t big enough,” O’Donnell said.

    Their waitress came back and hovered. Clearly she was hoping for something more lucrative from such a big table than five bottomless cups of coffee. Dixon and Neagley took the hint and ordered ice cream sundaes. Diana Bond passed. O’Donnell ordered a hamburger. The waitress stood and looked pointedly at Reacher. He wasn’t seeing her. He was still playing with his pile of napkins. Weighting it down with the sugar canister, lifting the sugar off, putting it back.
    “Sir?” the waitress said.
    Reacher looked up.
    “Apple pie,” he said. “With ice cream. And more coffee.”
    The waitress went away and Reacher went back to his pile of napkins. Diana Bond retrieved her purse from the floor and made a big show of dusting it off.
    “I should get back,” she said.
    “OK,” Reacher said. “Thank you very much for coming.”

55
    Diana Bond left for the long drive back to Edwards and Reacher neatened his stack of napkins and placed the sugar container back on top of it, exactly centered. The desserts arrived and more