Able One- Part Two

"The habit of reading is the only enjoyment in which there is no alloy; it lasts when all other pleasures fade."
- Anthony Trollope

All right, I know it has only been hours since my last post, but this one might be a bit longer, have more detail, and is needed to do my assignment for my FLVS class. On a side note, I think I will continue with this after my class is over like I'm doing it now. No great detail, just summary and my feelings on it. All right, lets roll!

Fun stuff in this installment! We start off this segment of the show with Lieutenant Sharmon and Colonel Christopher (apparently the Colonel is a woman, so the name threw me off for a bit) talking about the lack of a GPS. Sharmon tells the Colonel that he can navigate the plane, it would just be more reassuring with the GPS to back him up. The Colonel and Lieutenant then go around the corner and speak privately, Colonel Christopher asking Sharmon to call her Colonel instead of ma'am, and Sharmon telling her that his friends call him Jon. The Colonel reassures Jon that this flight is only a test run, nothing serious, and he has nothing to worry about.

A few moments later, the Colonel finds herself talking to Major Kaufman who informs her that there is no metsat (civilian satelites) operational in orbit, but the milsats (military satellites are fine). She takes this info with a grain of salt and continues to the flight line.

Another character, Harry (who had moved to California to get away from the snow and unrelenting weather of northern states), finds himself on the flight line next to the 747-400F trying to make a cell phone call to his superior. Unfortunately, the cell service is still down, so he just entered the plane. What else could he do?

This is an example of a Boeing 747-400F

At the Pentagon, General Higgins (the same general from before) is quickly trying to recall Air Force One from it's path to San Francisco out of fear that there might be a nuclear attack on the city. As this happens, Jamil and others in the room are forumlating theories as to who exactly is behind the outages and possible attack on America. Muslim Jihadists? Chinese who are angry at the U.S. for the world-wide recession? Eventually, they decide that until they can get eyes in either country again, they won't have a clue.

On Air Force One, the president's Chief of Staff, Norman Foster, delivered the request to the President, who didn't much like what he heard. He tells Foster that he won't turn around for four reasons. One, if he turns back, he looks like a coward. Two, he has faith in the missile defense systems in place on the west coast. Three, he's going out there to calm people down about the sudden outages of our satelites. And four, because he says so. With that, the conversation ends and Foster exits the room, thinking that he really doesn't want to be anywhere near San Francisco tonight.

Back in the Pentagon, the sae group from before is discussing the different forms of defense they can use, and what they're going to use it against. One member points out that we can try to hit it white it's in midcourse (coasting) phase with our two subs on their way to Japanese waters. Another points out that we have the missile defense systems in Alaska and California. But General Schieb adds one more possibility for attack during the boost phase, the Airborne Laser or ABL-1. The ABL-1 is able to shoot down missiles using a laser beam to pierce through the aluminum hull and blow up the fuselage. The General tells them to let the ABL-1 team know that they're headed for North Korea.

The ABL-1 (also pronounced Able One) is the source of the name of this novel.

Again, loved it and wish I had the time to read more of it. I did notice that this time I think the author's intent was more towards suspense for the President story, but revving up the pace for the upcoming missile chase over North Korea.

Able One

"No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance."
-Confucius

Hello people, I have good news and bad news. Good news, you will still be able to read my posts and stuff until I finish my class on FLVS. Bad news, I'm reading a new book. I just couldn't get into the other one and gave up when it was overdue, so now onto another book, Able One by the sci-fi writer who has won the Hugo award six times, Ben Bova. So what I'm going to do is read a few chapters at a time, not doing the detailed thing I was doing before, and give a basic summary according to what I remember and write my reaction to it.

So without further delay, here is the first part of Ben Bova's Able One.

The book starts off with a truck driver trying to find a diner in the middle of a town, but he can't because his GPS wouldn't work. He pulls into a truck stop and he finds out that nobody's GPS or cell phones are working. All across the country, anything that requires a satellite to work is shut down, non-functioning paperweights. The Stock Exchange is down, people die on operating room tables because of communication failures with the doctors operating remotely, and the government is wondering what the hell just happened.

You find out that a satellite was launched from North Korea hours before, and only three hours before the satellite outages, the satellite was actually a nuke and was detonated in the orbit of earth, taking out our unhardened satellites. The country is placed in DEFCON 1 (which is the highest level of readiness and war in imminent, also called the "cocked pistol" stage.) and there are talks of evacuating Honolulu, Anchorage, and Juneau. The President is due to give a speech in San Francisco later that day.

In the Pentagon, inside the Situation Room there is an emergency meeting taking place with top military officials and civilian experts about what could happen and what the U.S.'s best course of action is. The talk for a while about evacuating the aforementioned cities, then when a man named Jamil enters, he brings an interesting point. If the payload of the warhead was light enough, the missile could hit San Francisco. This doesn't bring an overly fearful or surprised response from anyone, simply a 'well crap...' (EXTREME PARAPHRASING) from the emotions of the people in the room.

When asked why someone would attack San Francisco, Jamil brings up the Sarajevo scenario. When WWI started, Archduke Franz Ferdinand I was assassinated in Saravejo, Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian Empire declared war on Serbia. Russia had a  treaty with Serbia, so they declare war on Austria-Hungary. Germany had an alliance with Austrio-Hungray, so they declare war on Russia. England and France had an alliance with Russia, so they declare war on Germany, and thus began WWI. He explains that this is applicable to us if the Koreans attack the United States. North Korea hits us, we hit them. The Chinese doesn't like that so they attack us. We counterattack China, Russia gets involved, then NATO, then full-scale nuclear war. As you might be able to guess, that's not very good for us.

That is where I stopped reading for today, but I'm foreseeing an amazing book. While I was reading this my mind was constantly asking 'what if this really happened?' and soaking up the information like a sponge. What I'm really liking about this book so far, is that it's realistic, and the actual military terms are broken down for you to be able to understand. For example, when the president is speaking with some others about missile defense, at the end of the chapter, before the next, he breaks down the different stages of missile defense from Boost Phase Defense to Terminal Phase Defense. And later when they're talking about the warhead strength, someone says something about 250-kilotons, someone else says that this is half a Megaton, and yet another explains that this is 25 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

I believe the authors intent was to evoke the response of 'poop is about to hit the fan!' and cause a tense atmosphere and feeling in the reader. Honestly, without their cell phones, many people would go insane, so imagine the whole country without a cell phone, GPS, country-wide broadcasting like the Weather Channel, and then imagine the countless nutcases out there now panicking and killing people.

There is definitely spatial organization in these chapters and probably the whole book seeing as it's split up by cities and locations instead of real chapters.