Project Cyclops Part 28

He rose and moved down the conduit, feeling along its curved sides, his back braced against the large bundle of power wires in the center while ahead of him the darkness gaped. A few yards farther, though, and the probing beam of his flashlight revealed a terminus where some of the s.h.i.+elded fiber optics had been shunted off into the wall, pa.s.sing through a heavy metal sleeve.

Although it was welded into a steel plate bolted to the side of the wall, large handles allowed the bolts to be turned without the aid of special wrenches. Whoever designed the fiber optics for this tunnel, he thought, didn't want a lot of Greek workmen down here waving tools around after a long lunch of guzzling retsina. The fibers were too vulnerable to stand up to any banging.

He grasped the handles and began to twist one, finding the bolts well lubricated. After four turns, it opened. The second yielded just as easily. Then the third and the fourth.

He took a deep breath, thinking this might be his first encounter with the hostages, and the terrorists. Then he slid the metal plate back away from the wall and tried to peer through. The opening was approximately a meter wide, with the bundle of fiber-optics cables directly through the middle. Still, he found just enough clearance to slip past and into the freezing cold of the room used to prep the payloads for the vehicles.

2:40 P.M.

"What's this all about?" LeFarge looked again at the sheet, then up at Number One. "SORT is intended to calculate orbital parameters. Optimize them."

"And if there is an abort? It has to go down somewhere."

"You're talking about a pre-specified abort?" LeFarge was trying to sound dumb. "The Cyclops can't power an ICBM." It probably could, but he didn't want to mention that.

The terrorist who called himself Number One was not impressed. "That's a question we will let the computer decide. I happen to believe it can.

You just send it up, then you abort. When you fail to achieve orbital velocity, it comes down. The nose has a reentry s.h.i.+eld, since you are planning to reuse the vehicle. It should work very nicely."

Georges looked at Cally. He did not want to admit it, but this guy was right. He had thought about that a lot. Any private s.p.a.ceport could be seized by terrorists and turned into a missile launch site. Was that their plan?

"I won't do it," he heard himself saying. "I refuse."

"That is a mistake," Number One replied calmly. "I will simply shoot one of your technicians here every five minutes until you begin." He smiled. "Would you like to pick the first? Preferably someone you can manage without."

"You're bluffing." He felt a chill. Something told him what he had just said wasn't true. This man, with his expensive suit

and haircut, meant every word. He was a killer. Georges knew he had never met anyone remotely like him.

"Young man, you are an amateur." His eyes had grown narrow, almost disappearing behind his gray aviator shades. "Amateurs do not know the first thing about bluffing. Now don't try my patience."

He turned and gestured one of the technicians toward them. He was a young man in his mid-twenties. He came forward and Number One asked his name.

"I'm Chris Schneider," he said. His blond hair and blue eyes attested to the fact. His father was a German farmer in Ohio, his mother a primary-school teacher. He had taken a degree in Engineering from Ohio State, then stumbled upon the dream job of his life. He was now thinking about moving to Greece.

"I'm sorry to have to make an example of you, Chris," Number One said, drawing out his Walther. . . .

2:41 P.M.

Vance realized he was in a satellite "clean room," painted a septic white with bright fluorescents overhead. Along one wall were steel tables, several of which held giant "glove boxes" that enabled a worker to handle satellite components without human contamination. Alongside those were instruments to measure ambient ionization and dust. Other systems in the room included banks of electronic equipment about whose function he could only speculate.

And what was that? . . . there, just above the door . . . it looked like a closed-circuit TV monitor, black-and-white. It seemed to be displaying the vague movements of a large control room, one with banks of computer screens in long rows and marshaled lines of technicians monitoring them. He studied the picture for a second, wondering why it seemed so familiar, and then he realized it looked just like TV shots of the Kennedy s.p.a.ce Center.

s.h.i.+vering from the cold, he moved closer to the screen, which was just clear enough to allow him to make out some of the figures in what had to be the command center. However, he saw only staffers; no sign of Bill Bates. One individual stood out, his suit and tie a marked contrast to the general open-s.h.i.+rt atmosphere, and he looked like he was giving the orders. He was now chatting with a woman and another, younger man, seated at a keyboard.

Then the well-dressed guy turned and beckoned one of the staffers forward. He said something to him and then--Jesus!--he pulled a pistol. .

2:42 P.M.

"No!" Cally screamed, but it was already too late. Before Chris Schneider even saw it coming, Ramirez shot him precisely between the eyes, neatly and without fanfare. The precision was almost clinical, and he was dead by the time he collapsed onto the gray linoleum tiles of the floor. His body lay motionless, his head nestled in a growing pool of dark blood.

Georges LeFarge looked on unbelieving. Had he really seen it? No, it was too grotesque. Chris, murdered in cold blood right before his eyes.

They had been talking only yesterday about going to Crete for the weekend, maybe renting a car. . . . Death had always been an abstraction, never anything to view up close. He had never seen a body.

He had never even imagined such things could really happen; it was only in the movies, right? Until this moment he had never confronted actual murder ever in his life.

Calypso Andros felt a shock, then a surge of emotional Novocain as her adrenaline pumped. Right then and there she decided that she was going to kill this b.a.s.t.a.r.d herself, personally, with her own hands. Number One, whoever he was, was a monster. No revenge . . .

Then the superego intervened. He's still got the gun. Wait, and get the son of a b.i.t.c.h when he's not expecting it.

"Georges," she said quietly, finally collecting herself, "you'd better do what he says."

LeFarge was still too astonished to think, let alone talk.

This horror was outside every realm of reason. He had no way to file it within any known category contained in his mind.

"She is giving you excellent advice," Number One was saying. "You would be wise to listen. In any case, I merely want you to demonstrate the technical capabilities of this system." He smiled as though nothing had happened. "An intellectual exercise."

Georges looked at Cally and watched her nod. Her eyes seemed almost empty. Was it shock? How could she manage to carry on?

Well, he thought, if she can do it, then so can I.

Slowly he revolved and examined the computer terminal in front of him.

The cool green of the screen was all that remained recognizable, the only thing to which he could still relate.

"All right." He barely heard his own words as he glanced down at the sheet. "I'll see if I can put in a run."

The room around them was paralyzed in time, the single thunk of the pistol having reverberated louder than a cannon shot. Like Georges, none of the other young technicians had ever witnessed an overt act of violence. It produced a new reality, a jolt that made the senses suddenly grow sharper, the hearing more acute, the periphery of vision wider.

Still in shock, he typed an instruction into his Fujitsu workstation, telling it to start back-calculating the trajectory of an abort splashdown for various locations. Then he began typing in the numbers on the sheet. The first coordinates, he realized at once, were somewhere close. But where?

2:43 P.M.