"Something funny is definitely going on," Mikis continued, to no one in particular. He had already discovered the eccentric American professor with a baseball cap didn't care all that much for small talk. And he had no patience whatsoever for small talk that pointed out the obvious. "I don't like this, but I'll have to put her down. I'm already on my auxiliary tank."For once Mannheim allowed his thoughts to stray to the concerns of someone else. "There's an airfield at Kythera. You could make it there, if you just touched down here and dropped me off.""Are you sure you want to do that?" Mikis was gripping the stick, frowning behind his aviator shades. "We can't raise anybody here on the radio, and now there's this mess. Let me take you to Kythera with me. The whole deal looks weird.""No," Mannheim shouted back. "I have to find out what's happened."This project is like Sarah, he thought, his estranged daughter coming to mind. I had to do everything I knew how to try to keep her from making the wrong decisions. Then he remembered ruefully that she had gone ahead and made them anyway. But he had been there always, ready to give her advice.Mikis shrugged, clearly worried, and gave the Jetranger some pedal, circling to search for signs of life. There was nothing. The bleak granite cliffs were barren, and the cool blue of the light surf washed against an empty shoreline. He had not seen this space facility before, but everybody had heard about it. The most impressive sight was, of course, those silver spires down at the other end of the island. Those had to be their vehicles, but nobody was around them now. Puzzled, he examined the huge dormitory-type residence in the middle of the island and the supply buildings, lined along a paved segment connecting the landing pad with the main building, and still saw no one."Look, I'm going to just drop you off and then get the hell out of here," he yelled over. He was easing up on the collective, taking her in. "I'll buy petrol on Kythera. I don't see anybody around, and this place gives me the creeps.""You've done all you need to," Mannheim shouted back. "Something . . ."His voice trailed off as he finally saw some movement. A figure was coming down the mountain, carrying what looked like an automatic weapon."We'd better make this quick."1:21 P.M.Vance was moving as fast as he could and watching as the helicopter—now about a thousand yards from the pad—began its final approach.Friend or foe? With the second arrival in as many hours, the place resembled an airport. He assumed by now they surely had seen the wreckage of the Hind, but they seemed determined to come in anyway.He watched as the old Bell gingerly began to hover above the landing pad, the pilot dispensing with preliminaries. While it was settling in, he chambered a round in the Uzi, pulled back the gnarled cocking lever on the top, and continued on down the hill at a brisk pace. With any luck he would beat the guys in black. Or maybe they were deliberately keeping a low profile, hoping to lure in the prey. They were also luring him out, he knew, but he had to take the chance.He was moving quickly, the sharp rocks cutting into his feet, and now only a hundred yards or so remained between him and the approaching helo.Only then did he first notice he had bumped Bill's new Agusta when he tried to fly the Hind, leaving a bad dent. Now he owed Bates for repairs. Great. He wondered fleetingly if SatCom had terrorist insurance.There was now an opening in the pad's protective fence, where the Hind had ripped it away, and as the din of the approaching helicopter rang in his ears, he raced across the last clearing, headed for it. But his instincts caused him to look around, and just in time . . .Approaching on the run down the asphalt road leading from the launch facility were three of the terrorists. He recognized two of them as his earlier assailants, together with a third who looked like he might actually know what he was doing. They must have seen the arriving Jetranger, and now they were coming out to give it a welcome.The way they were moving, and the AK-47s they were carrying, told him a lot. The chopper's occupants were the good guys.As the Bell settled in and its door opened, he dropped onto the granite and nestled the metal stock of the Uzi against his cheek. It felt warm from the morning sun, like the touch of a comfortable friend. He flipped the fire control to semiautomatic and caught the approaching goons in the metal sight. Then he gently squeezed the trigger.The Uzi kicked back, sending a round upward into the morning air. He realized he was out of practice. Next time he would handle it better, but for now he had blown the operation.The three in black who had been running toward the landing pad dropped onto the asphalt and opened fire, spattering flecks of granite around him as he took cover. Then he looked up to see an elderly man fairly tumble out of the chopper and make a dash for the safety of the SatCom Agusta. He need not have hurried; no one was shooting at him.As the Jetranger started to lift off, however, the gunmen's focus switched away from Vance, and he realized they had no intention of letting it escape. As it left the pad and banked to gain altitude, the lead terrorist dropped to a prone position on the asphalt and took aim directly at the cockpit, where the pilot was just visible behind the glare of the windscreen. With a range of only fifty yards, Vance realized, taking him out would be easy.It was. The AK-47 was on full auto, and one burst splintered away the windscreen, exploding it and leaving what remained spattered with blood. The pilot was thrown against the shattered glass, then left hanging halfway through. He never knew what hit him.The fuselage began to pirouette into a sickening spiral, but the firing continued, as though to kill what was already dead. The gunman's obsessed, Vance thought. He's also emptying his magazine.Now's the time. Make a move while he's still distracted. These thugs want the old man alive, whoever he is. So why not try and ruin their day, get him before they do.The Bell continued to autorotate in a series of circles. Then it abruptly nosed straight downward, and a second later it veered toward the side of the cliff abutting the sea. A splintering crash replaced the sound of the engine as the rotors slammed against the granite, shearing away—whereupon the fuselage bounced down the steep wall of the cliff and into the water. In moments the seabed swallowed it up.In the meantime Vance had reached the landing pad, a few meters away from the old man, who was stumbling distractedly across the asphalt, staring in the direction the chopper had disappeared and so shocked by the sight he seemed not to realize he was walking directly into the hands of the men who had killed the pilot.Vance wanted to shout, but then he thought better of it. What was the point? The old man clearly was unable to think. He had to be pulled out quickly and with a minimum of risk. No, the best thing to do was lay down a line of covering fire and go for him.He opened up the Uzi on semiauto and dashed for the Agusta.1:25p.m.Wolf Helling hit the ground rolling, bringing up his Kalashnikov, set on automatic. The renegade guard was back to shoot it out, firing from somewhere in the area of the pad.Good. He was going to trap the fucker. This time he would handle the situation personally; he would not have to depend on a bunch of incompetent East German Stasi burnouts.He glanced back and saw the two trailing behind him. When the guard had opened fire, they'd dived and stumbled pell-mell for the cover of the storage sheds. They wouldn't be any help, but he'd known that already.It didn't matter. This was going to be one-on-one. And easy.The chopper had been lost, which was a shame. Although Ramirez's orders were to seize it when it arrived, that had not been possible. You win some, you lose some.Amid the gunfire the old man had reached the SatCom helicopter, while the guard was now making a dash for its protection, too, even as he covered himself with another spray from the automatic that the damn fools had let him get.Fortunately his aim was wild again, probably because he was running, and the rounds sailed by harmlessly. And he was in the open.Now.Helling trained his AK-47, long barrel and heavy clip, on him and pulled the trigger. . . .His clip was empty.Scheisse! He cursed himself for having used the gun on automatic. At ten pops a second, you could wipe out a 35- round clip before you could sneeze.Still cursing, he pushed the button releasing the clip and slammed in another. But he was too late; by that time the guard had disappeared behind the SatCom helicopter. The two East Germans were firing randomly and ineffectually from the safety of the storage sheds, holding their weapons around the corners and spraying blindly. Idiots. They were providing cover, but since they had no idea where they were aiming, they were endangering him at least as much as their target.And now the bastard had reached the cover of the helicopter. He was safe for the moment. But only for the moment.1:27p.m."Don't shoot," Isaac Mannheim shouted as he saw the unshaven, barefoot man roll next to him, an Uzi giving off bursts of rounds."Get down," Vance yelled back, then shoved him onto the asphalt beside the blue-and-white Agusta. "You picked a hell of a time to come visiting. There're some new natives, and they're not overly friendly.""Who are you?" The old man's ancient eyes were brimming with alarm and confusion. "What are you doing here?""At the moment I'm trying to keep you alive." Vance checked the clip of the Uzi. There were about seven rounds left. With three hoods out there, all with Kalashnikovs, seven rounds would not go very far.Was anything usable in the Agusta? he asked himself. He peered through the glass of the cockpit, searching. It looked empty. Except for—A blast of fire careened by the canopy, and he again yanked Mannheim down onto the asphalt. Then he cautiously raised up enough to recon the situation.The hoods were all advancing now, scurrying forward from building to building as they gave covering blasts from their automatics. However, the two farthest back did not seem to be overly enthusiastic."They're going to kill us, too," Mannheim stammered. "Can you—?""Just stay down," Vance interrupted him. "I'm probably the one they want to get rid of. If they'd wanted you dead, believe me, you would be by now."He opened the door and hurriedly surveyed the cockpit more closely. Yes, he had seen it right . . .Attached to the back firewall, ready for emergency use, was a rack of smoke grenades, factory fresh, the kind used for signaling in case the helo went down.He remembered that grenade smoke was designed to cling to the ground rather than rise, and with a burn time between one and two minutes, a good grenade could produce a quarter million cubic feet of HC smoke.Maybe, he thought, I just got lucky.He peeled one off the rack and checked it over. Yep, American M-18, which everybody knew was the best. The can was about the size of a Diet Coke, and it was military gray. It even gave the flavor on the side—this one was red, but they also came in yellow and white. Nice to have around if you went down in wooded terrain.He looked toward the gunmen approaching and made the decision on the spot. With a quick motion he clenched the handle with his right hand and yanked the steel pin with his left. When he looked up again, they had closed the distance, now only about thirty yards. Time for a touchdown.He drew back and lobbed the can directly at the lead terrorist.The time delay was one and a half seconds. It landed just in front of the first man, bounced once, and blew—an eruption of red that engulfed him.Beautiful.With a quick twist he yanked the rack from the side of the cockpit and began hurling the cans as fast as he could. Finally, he grabbed the startled old professor by the arm, then dropped the last grenade at their feet."Time to move the party. There's cover in the rocks up there."Mannheim stumbled backward as the smoke bomb exploded, and Vance realized he would never make it. He would have to be dragged, or carried. And since dragging was out of the question, there really was only one option.He bent down and grabbed the old man around the waist, then lifted him over his shoulder. It turned out he was hardly more than skin and bones, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, tops. After spending the last four days heaving the tillers of the late, lamentedOdysseyII, the load seemed like a feather.Some more random gunfire exploded behind them as he struggled and stumbled up the rocky slope, but now a dense cloud of red completely obliterated the scene below. The M-18 grenades were still billowing, totally obscuring the landing pad and the roadway.When they reached the first clump of brush leading up the mountain, he settled Mannheim onto the ground. The old professor was choking from the smoke, totally disoriented, and babbling. Vance clapped a hand over his mouth, then urged him onward."No talking. If they find us, we're going to have some really lousy odds."He removed his hand, and immediately Mannheim started again."Whoever you are, I guess I have to thank you for saving my life." He puffed over the stones. "Who are you?""I'm a friend of Bill Bates, the man supposedly in charge around here.""I'm Isaac Mannheim. This project—""The godfather." Vance looked him over. "Bill's talked about you. MIT, right?"“The Cyclops is my—""Nice to meet you. Now who in the hell are these thugs?""I have no idea.""Well, we can assume they're not part of Bill's technical support team." He glanced down the hill, toward the drifting cloud of red smoke, then back at the old man. "But if you've been involved in this project, then you must know the layout here.""I know it very well. But—""Good. We're going to have to keep moving, at least till it gets dark, but while we're doing that, I want you to get me up to speed on where things are. Give me the setup. And tell me how many personnel are here and where they are."Mannheim pointed down the hill, at a point just past the storage sheds. "The people are housed in the Bates Motel, which is over there, beyond that row of buildings."Vance looked it over. At the moment it seemed deserted."Where's the entrance?""You can go in directly from the connecting corridor underground, or you can use the front entrance, there.""What if the entrance topside were locked? Then it would he secure, right?""I suppose so." He still seemed disoriented, though he was recovering. "Of course there are fire exits at various places in the underground network, as well as the security lobby over there. And then, the storage sheds can be accessed from below.""But all of those entry-points can be sealed, right?""Yes. In fact, they can be sealed electronically, from Command. The staff controls everything from there."Vance looked down at the white surf rippled across the blue. "So if somebody wanted to take over this place, that's where they would start, right? Hit that and you're in like a bandit. It's the head office."“That's correct." Mannheim nodded."Good. We know where to focus. Now you're going to tell me how I can get there."Chapter Seven2:18 P.M.Pierre Armont was forty-six, with gray temples and a body appropriate to an Olympic wrestler. He had full cheeks, a heavy mustache, and suspicious dark eyes that constantly searched his surroundings. It was an innate survival instinct.He never went out without a tie and a perfect shoeshine, not to mention a crisp military bearing that sat as comfortably on him as a birthright. He prided himself on his ability to instill discipline while at the same time leading his men. Although he liked to command, he wanted to do it from the front, where the action was.Here in Paris he ran a worldwide business from a gray stone townhouse situated on the Left Bank in an obscure cul-de-sac at the intersection of Saint-Andre des Arts and rue de l'Ancienne Comedie. Fifty meters away from his ivy-covered doorway, the rue de Seine wound down to the river, playing host to one of Paris's finer open-air produce markets, while farther down, rows of small galleries displayed the latest in Neo-Deconstructionist painting and sculpture. An avid amateur chef and art collector, he found the location ideal. From his house, where the French aviator Saint-Exupery once wrote, he could march a few paces, along cobblestones as old as Chartres, and acquire a freshly plucked pheasant, a plump grouse, aromatic black truffles just hours away from the countryside, or an abstract landscape whose paint was scarcely dry. It was the best of all worlds: everything he loved was just meters away, and yet his secretive courtyard provided perfect urban privacy and security, with only the occasional blue-jeaned student from the Academie de Beaux-Arts wandering into his courtyard to sketch. He was rich and he knew how to live well; he also risked his life on a regular basis.He claimed it made hisfoie grastaste even better.He worked behind a wide oak desk flanked by a line of state-of-the-art communications equipment, and along one walnut-paneled wall stood rows of files secured inside teak-wood-camouflaged safes. His wide oak desk could have belonged in the office of a travel agent with a very select clientele. However, it served another purpose entirely: it was where he planned operations for ARM.Pierre Armont headed up the Association of Retired Mercenaries, and he had been busy all day. But he was used to emergencies. What other people called problems, ARM thought of as business.The Association of Retired Mercenaries was a secretive but loose group of former members of various antiterrorist organizations. The name was an inside joke, because they were far from retired. Although they were not listed in the Paris phone book, governments who needed their services somehow always knew how to find Pierre. ARM took on nasty counterterrorism actions that could not occur officially. They rescued hostages unreported in newspapers, and they had terminated more than a few unpleasant individuals in covert actions that never made the evening news.At the moment, as he was thinking over the insertion strategy for Andikythera, he was gazing down on his private courtyard and noticing that the honking from the boulevard Saint-Germain indicated that Paris's mid-afternoon traffic had ground to a halt. Again. He had just hung up the scrambled phone, after a thirty-minute conversation with Reggie Hall, the second today. London was on board, so everything was a go. He was looking forward to this one. Somebatardshad mucked with an ARM job. They had to be taken down.Armont was retired from France's antiterrorist Groupement d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, known as GIGN, ideal experience for his present occupation. Over the years "Gigene" had carried out, among other things, VIP protection in high-threat situations and general antiterrorist ops. Mostly commandos in their twenties and early thirties, Gigene operatives had to pass a grueling series of tests, including firing an H&K MP5 one-handed while swinging through a window in a quick entry called the pendulum technique. Known for their skills in inserting by helicopter, either by rappelling or by parachuting, they could also swim half a mile under water and come out blasting, using their specially loaded Norma ammo.Armont's particular claim to fame was the invention of a sophisticated slingshot that fired deadly steel balls for a silent kill. He had trained antiterrorist units in a number of France's former colonies, and had secretly provided tactical guidance for the Saudi National Guard when they ejected radical Muslims from the Great Mosque at Mecca.These days, however, he was a private citizen and ran a simple business. And as with all well-run businesses, the customer was king. If problems arose, they had to be resolved; if a job did not stick, you sent in a repair team. An American member of ARM named Michael Vance, who normally did not participate in the operations end of the business, had turned up at the wrong place at the right time. A Reuters confirmation of the loss of the U.S. communications ship definitely meant some bad action had gone down in the eastern Med. Vance's analysis that it was a preliminary to seizure of the SatCom facility on Andikythera probably was correct. Armont's secretary had spent the day on the phone trying to reach the island, but all commercial communications with the site were down. There was no way that should have happened, even with last night's rough storm.He had liked Michael Vance the minute he met him, three years earlier. He considered Mike reliable in completing his assignments—be they quick access to a "secure" bank computer file or a paper trail of wire transfers stretching from Miami to Nassau to Geneva to Bogota. Vance's regular missions for ARM, however, were those kinds of transactions, not the street action, and Armont could only hope he could also manage the rougher end of the business.The organization had checked out the man extensively, as they did all new members, and ARM's computer probably knew as much about him as he did himself. It was an oddball story: son of a famous Penn archaeologist, he had been by turns an archaeologist himself, a yachtsman, and a low-level spook. After he finished his doctorate at Yale and had taught there for two semesters, he had published his dissertation—claiming the famous Palace of Minos in Crete was actually a hallowed necropolis—as a book. It had caused a lot of flap, and to get away for a while, he had taken a vacation in Nassau to do some big-game fishing. Before the trip ended, he had bought an old forty-four-foot Bristol sailboat in need of massive restoration. It was a classic wooden vessel, which meant that no sooner had he finished varnishing the thing from one end to the other than he had to start over again.But he apparently liked the life. Or maybe he just enjoyed giving the academic snakepit a rest. The computer could not get into his mind. Whatever the reason, however, the sailboat, which had begun as a diversion, soon became something else. By the time he had finished refurbishing her, she was the most beautiful yacht in the Caribbean, and everybody around Nassau wanted a shot at the helm. He had a charter business on his hands.Then his saga took yet another turn. The Nassau Yacht Club, and the new Hurricane Hole Marina across the bridge on Paradise Island, comprised a yachting fraternity that included a lot of bankers. Nassau, after all, had over three hundred foreign commercial banks, and its "see no evil" approach to regulation and reporting made it a natural haven for drug receipts. With a lot of bankers as clients, before long Vance knew more than any man should about offshore money laundering. He did not like that part of the scene, but the bankers loved his yacht, and they paid cash.As he once told it, he eventually found out why. At least for one of them. One sunny afternoon the vice president of the European Consolidated Commercial Bank, an attractive blond-haired young Swiss mover known to Vance only as "Werner," was dockingThe Ulyssesat Hurricane Hole, bringing her back from a three-day sail, when the DEA swooped down, flanked by the local Bahamian police. Armed with warrants, they searched the boat and soon uncovered fifty kilos of Colombian export produce. Seems "Werner" had sailedThe Ulyssesto some prearranged point and taken it on, planning to have divers stash the packages in the rudder-trunk air pocket of one of the giant cruise ships that tied up at Nassau's four-berth dock. Vance heard about it when he got a call from the harbormaster advising him that his prized Bristol had just been seized as evidence in a coke bust. He was out of business.That afternoon Bill Bates had coincidentally flown in on Merv Griffin's Paradise Island commuter airline and come over to Hurricane Hole, wanting to charterThe Ulyssesfor a week of sailing and fishing. Vance had to inform him his favorite Bahamian yacht had just acquired a new owner.Bates could not believe he had flown into such a screw-up. Vance was having his own problems with disbelief, too, but paying the mortgage was his more immediate concern. The DEA had the boat, but before long he wouldn't have to worry about that any more. That problem, and the boat, would soon belong to the mortgage-holding bank over on Bay Street.He immediately slapped the DEA with a two-million-dollar lawsuit, just to put on some heat. His lawyer claimed he didn't have a hope in hell.But two weeks later a Bahamian judge, after lunch with the mortgage-holding banker, summarily ordered the DEA to release the yacht. To Vance's surprise, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cheerfully complied and turned it over the same afternoon. He immediately dropped the lawsuit, writing off the whole affair as a triumph for truth, justice, and the Bahamian way of banking. Or so it seemed.Only later did he unearth the Byzantine complexities of what really had happened. The affair had somehow come to the attention of The Company, and there had been a flurry of phone calls to the DEA in New Orleans from Langley, Virginia. A month later, while he was in the States attending a Yale alumni function, he'd found himself talking to two earnest Washington bureaucrats, who congratulated him on beating the system. Huh?They then described their need for a "financial consultant" in Nassau, somebody who knew the right people. Maybe he would consider taking the job; it could merely be a favor for—they hinted broadly—a favor.Here was the problem: the CIA desperately needed help in trying to keep track of the cocaine millions being laundered through Nassau's go-go banks. The Company wanted some local assistance getting certain off-the-record audits, from clean bankers who were tired of Nassau being a haven for dirty cash.He hated drugs and drug money, so he had seen nothing wrong with the idea. He even ended up training some greenhorns out of Langley in the subtle art of tracing wire transfers. Two years later he got his payoff. They formed their own in-house desk to do what he had been doing and retired him. He was, it turned out, too successful.But the word on such skills got around, and two months later Pierre Armont had approached him about joining ARM. They needed somebody good at tracing hot money, frequently the most reliable trail of a terrorist operation, and everybody close to the business had identified him as the best around.By that time he had formally incorporated a charter operation in Nassau as Windstalker, Ltd., with three boats, three mortgages, and a big monthly nut. So he had signed on, only later discovering that along with ARM's extra cash came a lot of travel, many responsibilities, and occasional death threats. He took them seriously enough to start carrying his own protection, a chrome-plated 9mm Walther. Armont approved.Vance had always been well paid. It was expected. Anybody who hired ARM—usually because there was nowhere else left to turn—knew the best did not come cheap. A good two-week op could pull down fifty thousand pounds sterling for every man on the team, which was why the boys drove BMWs and drank twelve-year-old Scotch. But no client ever complained about the price. Or if they did, they didn't complain to Pierre. Payment was always cash, half up front and the rest on delivery. Any client who welshed on the follow-through would be making a very ill-considered career decision.He pulled the blinds and turned to his desk. Faxes sent via ARM's secure, encrypted system covered the surface. The team was coming together. His secretary Emile, a young Frenchman who came in mornings and worked in the next room, had already booked the necessary flights. By 1800 hours tomorrow everybody would be assembled in Athens and ready to insert.Armont intended to lead the operation himself . . . unless Vance, as the man on the ground, proved the logical choice. Since he was already in place, always the best location, he would in any case have to be point man.He had talked the job over with "Hans" in Frankfurt at 1030 hours, just after he had gotten the call from Athens, and together they had picked six operatives. Vance would make seven. He calculated that would be plenty."Hans" was thenom de guerreof a former GSG-9, Germany's green-beret-sporting Grenzschutzgruppen 9. GSG-9, headquartered at St. Augustin just outside Bonn, had a nine- million-dollar underground training range that included a communications and intel unit, aircraft mockups, an engineer unit, a weapons unit, an equipment unit, a training unit, and a strike unit. In his fifteen years with GSG-9, Hans had been known to achieve 95 percent accuracy with an H&K MP9 when firing from a moving vehicle or even rappelling down a rope from a hovering chopper. Now retired, he brought to ARM many talents: as well as participating in the on-site op, he usually acted as liaison officer because of his flawless English.He also knew which old-timers from GSG-9—that was anybody over thirty-five—were looking for an op, and if thejob required some younger talent he used his connections to get current members temporarily released from their units. When needed, he could arrange for special-purpose weapons otherwise "unavailable" or restricted. Once, when a sniper-assault situation called for a hot new IR scope, he borrowed one from the St. Augustin armory overnight, made a drawing, then had it copied in Brussels by noon the next day. He knew where to find ARM field operatives and what shape they were in—which ones had been shot up, broken legs in parachute drops, or gone over the edge with a case of nerves and too much booze.Best of all, though, he could usually locate a wanted terrorist. GSG-9 was hooked directly into a massive computer in Wiesbaden informally known as the Kommissar. Hans could still tap into the Kommissar, which tracked various world terrorist groups, constantly updating everything known about their methods, their membership, and—most importantly—their movements.These days he operated a rundownbiergartenin Frankfurt, at least as his cover, and there were suspicions he managed to drink up a lot of its profits. In any case, he was in ARM for the money, and he never pretended otherwise. So when Armont rang him, he was immediately all ears. Never failed."Pierre,alio! Comment allez vous?"Even at ten-thirty in the morning Hans could be cheerful. Armont, definitely a night person, never understood how he did it."Bien, considering." Armont knew Hans was more comfortable in English than in French, and he hated speaking German. "What're you doing for the next couple of days?""Got something?" The German's interest immediately perked up."There's a little cleanup . . ."After he gave him a quick briefing on the situation via their secure phone, Hans was extremely unhappy."Dimitri screwed up. It's not our problem.""I say it's our problem," Pierre replied. "We guarantee our work and you're either in, or you're out. Permanently. Those are the rules.""All right." Hans sighed. "Can't blame me for not liking it, though.""So who do you think we need?" Armont asked. Hans knew the people better than he did."Well, we definitely should have Reggie," he replied straightaway. "He's the best negotiator we've got, and also he can get us some of the hardware we'll be needing."The man in question was Reginald Hall. Just under fifty, he was a stocky ex-small-arms instructor, regimental sergeant major, retired, of the SAS, Britain's Special Air Service. In the old days he headed up a unit known in the press as the CRW, Counter Revolutionary Warfare section, called "the special projects blokes" by those on the inside.He finally quit after successfully leading an assault on the Iranian embassy in London on 5 May 1980—which, to his astonished dismay, was televised live. He'd gotten famous overnight, and after thinking it over for a weekend, he decided the time had come to cash it in. These days he ran a small company that purportedly bought and sold used sports firearms. That was a polite way of saying he dabbled in the international arms trade, though not in a big way. But whenever ABM needed a special piece of equipment, as often as not Reggie found a way to take care of it.He did not do it for love. Even though he was happily retired down in Dorset, Thomas Hardy country, with a plump Welsh common-law wife, he occasionally slipped away—much to her chagrin—to take on special ops for ARM. Maybe his neighbors thought he had bought their matching Jaguars with his army pension or the sale of used Mausers."I'll call him as soon as we hang up. He spent some time in the Emirates or some damn place and claims to speak a little Arabic." He was thinking. "Okay, who else could we use?""How about the Flying Dutchmen?" Hans said.He was referring to the Voorst brothers, Willem and Hugo, both former members of the Royal Dutch Marines' "Whiskey Company." That was the nickname of a special group officially known as the Marine Close Combat Unit. Both bachelors, though never short of women, they lived in Amsterdam and took on any security job that looked like it would pay. They also ran a part-time aircraft charter operation."We might need a chopper for the insert. Think they can handle it on such short notice?"The Voorst brothers would occasionally arrange, through their old connections, for a Dutch military helicopter to get lost in paperwork for a weekend. Whiskey Company was a club, and everybody was going to retire someday. What went around came around. Besides, there was plenty of spare change in it for those who made the arrangements."With nobody paying? It'll take some fast talking.""So far, this thing's being done on spec. We're just making good on a job.""Don't remind me," Hans groaned. "Don't want to hear it. I think we'd better just rent something in Athens." He paused. "But I also think we ought to take along the Hunter. He'd be the man to handle grenades. He loves those damned things better than his wife."They were both thinking of Marcel, formerly of the Belgian ESI, Escadron Special d'lntervention. While with ESI, he had fathered their famous four-man units, pairs of two-man teams, and had come up with the idea of carrying a spare magazine on the strong-side wrist to facilitate rapid mag change. ESI was known informally as Diana Unit, and since Diana was the huntress of mythology, Marcel had become known as the Hunter. But not till after he had earned the sobriquet. A former Belgian paratrooper, ex-Angola, he got the nickname after a special op there, when he had saved an entire ARM team by taking out a room of terrorists with three stun grenades, tear gas, and an Uzi—while wearing an antiflash hood called a balaclava plus a gas mask, a little like working under water. Marcel liked the nickname."I'll see if I can reach him. The Antwerp number.""Well, we'll probably need him." Hans paused. "And Vance is already on site. That'll make all the difference.""He's good. If you can get all the others, I think we'll have what we need."'Then, let's get started. I'll try to reach everybody and have them in Athens by late tomorrow. Fax me an equipment list and I'll talk that over with Spiros. See what he can get together for us down there and save having to ship it.""You know,mon cher," Hans had said, "this is no way to start a day."1:29p.m."It was there for the National Security Agency, the NSA," admitted Theodore Brock, his special assistant for national security affairs. The atmosphere in the Oval Office was heating up."I'm now well aware of that," the President snapped, not bothering to hide his annoyance. "What I'm not well aware of is who the hell authorized it?"The Oval Office, in the southeast corner of the White House West Wing, was, in the eyes of many, a small, unimposing prize for all the effort required to take up residence. John Hansen, however, seemed not to notice. He commandeered whatever space he happened to occupy and made it seem an extension of his own spirit. In fact, he rather liked the minimalist quarters, heritage of a time when U.S. presidents had much less weight on their shoulders. From here the wide world opened out. For one thing, the communications here and in the Situation Boom in the basement put the planet at his fingertips. Next to a gigantic push-button multiline telephone was another, highly secure and modernistic, digital voice transmission system that could take him anywhere.As the old-fashioned Danish grandfather clock—his only personal item in the office—began to chime the half hour, he glanced once more over the crisis summary that Alicia Winston had hastily assembled and had waiting on his desk when he returned from New York. Her office was conveniently just behind one of the three doors that led into the Oval Office. Another led to his personal study, passing through a small kitchen, from which now came the aroma of fresh-brewed Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. The third opened onto a corridor, with the standard six Secret Service people, through which he expected to see his national security adviser appear at 1:45p.m. Then, according to his schedule, he had to try to put all this out of his mind at 2:30, when he was due to host a delegation of troglodytes from the Hill. Nuclear disarmament did not have a lot of friends in Tennessee and Washington State. He was going to have to make some concessions, he knew, but politics was about compromise, always had been."Apparently the ship was put into place without authorization," Brock went on. "There was some back-channel request from NSA. They wanted to keep tabs on a space project on an island in the Aegean.""SatCom. Now we're spying on Americans, is that it?" Hansen leaned back in his high, Kevlar-protected chair and tossed a telling glance toward Morton Davies, his chief of staff, who monitored most of his incoming calls. They both had received an earful on the Cyclops project from his old professor, Isaac Mannheim—who claimed it would demonstrate to the world that America's private sector still had plenty of life left, could stand up to the Europeans and the Japanese when it came to innovation. SatCom's independence from government, at least to Mannheim's way of thinking, was precisely its greatest virtue."Well, damn NSA," he continued. "This is an outrage."He recalled that he'd sent the new director, Al Giramonti, a pointedly worded memo on that very subject. When John Hansen took office, the National Security Agency was still liberally exercising its capacity to monitor every phone call in America from its vast array of listening antennas at Fort Meade. He had resolved to terminate the practice. He thought he had."It was just routine surveillance," Brock insisted, squirming. He was in his late fifties, bright, with horn-rimmed glasses and a high forehead. He also was black, and he felt he had more than the usual obligation to make his President look good. "There was a satellite test launching in the works. The whole project has been kept under wraps, and NASA wanted to know what was going on. The National Security Agency had a platform in the area, so it all more or less meshed. There was nothing—""And what do the Israelis have to say for themselves?" the President pushed on. "The Hind had their markings.""They deny they had anything to do with it." He squinted toward Hansen, trying to seem knowledgeable yet uncommitted. Which way was the wind going to blow next? "Even though the helo was plainly ID'd by—""That's what they claimed in '67," Hansen fumed, cutting him off, "when they strafed, torpedoed, and napalmed NSA's Liberty, which was clearly in international waters. They were hoping to prolong the Six-Day War long enough to roll into Syria, and they didn't want us to monitor their plans. So they took careful pains to knock out all our SIGINT capability in the region, just happening to kill a dozen seamen in the process. Afterwards the lying fuckers told our embassy in Tel Aviv it was all a mistake and sent flowers. If anybody else in the world had done that, we'd have nuked them.""Well, at the time the Glover was hit, it wasn't monitoring Israeli SIGINT," Brock noted, adjusting his glasses. "We think they're clean on this one. At least what we have from Fort Meade so far seems to bear that out. They're still running a computer analysis, though, pulling out all the voice and code used by the Israeli Air Force during that time. We didn't have that capability back in 1967. In a few more hours we'll be able to put that question to rest, one way or another.""Okay, maybe we should go slow till then. So in the meantime, let's take them at their word for a moment and examine the other possibilities." Hansen revolved in his chair and stared out the bulletproof window behind him. The Washington sky was growing overcast. And the clock was running. This whole screw-up would be in tomorrow's Washington Post, garbled, just as sure as the sun was going to come up. CNN had already picked up the BBC's "rumor" and was running it on their "Headline" service, hinting the U.S. intelligence community had been caught with its pants around its ankles, again."There's more," Brock said, interrupting his thoughts. "The Iranians have been screaming about a stolen Hind for four days, blaming us, of course. But they've quietly let Mossad know they think it may have strayed into Pakistan, maybe as a diversion, and then ended up heading out for one of the Gulf states, probably Yemen. The Israelis have reason to believe it was delivered to a Yemeni-flagged freighter in the Persian Gulf, then taken through the Suez Canal and into the eastern Med. After that, all contact was lost."Iran, the President thought. Pakistan. None of it sorted into a picture. Unless . . ."Incidentally," Morton Davies, Chief of Staff, interjected, "the Israelis also have one other bit of intel that seems to have somehow gotten lost in all of NSA's Cray supercomputers. An Israeli 'fishing trawler' picked up a Mayday they triangulated as coming from somewhere north of Crete. It supposedly claimed—the transmission was a bit garbled—to emanate from the very Hind that had attacked the ship. The broadcast said that terrorists had taken over the SatCom facility on the island of Andikythera. If that's true, it would be the one that the Glover was monitoring."Hansen stared at him. "Are we supposed to believe any of this? That unknown terrorists are behind this whole thing? That's exactly the kind of disinformation the Israelis have used on us in the past. Besides, it doesn't click. If terrorists did do it, they'd damned sure want the credit. Nobody throws a rock this size through your window unless there's a note attached. So where is it?"That's when the import of what Davies had said hit him. SatCom. It was going to be the pride of America, a symbol . . . My God, it was a rocket launch facility.He reached down and touched the blue button on the desk intercom on the right side of his desk."Alicia.""Sir," came back the crisp reply."Have NSA send over any recent PHOTOINT they have on the Greek island of Andikythera. By hand. I want it yesterday.""Yes, sir.""Ted," he said, turning back to Brock, "somehow this timeI've got an uncomfortable feeling the medium may be the message."1:49p.m."To understand the operation of this facility," Isaac Mannheim was saying, "you need to appreciate the technology we've installed here." He was resting against the trunk of a tree, gazing wearily down the mountain at the sun-baked asphalt of the facility stretching below."I've already got a rough idea how it works," Vance replied. He was pondering the quiet down below. "It's the people I want to know more about.""Well, of course, that's my primary concern as well." The old man shrugged. "But we are on the verge of an experiment that will change the world for all time. That's just as important.""Not in my book.""Perhaps. But all the same, I think I should tell you a few technical details about the facility. Since you say you're familiar with its general workings, you probably know that its heart is a twenty-gigawatt laser we call the Cyclops. Using it, we can send a high-energy beam hundreds of miles into space without losing appreciable energy. Our plan is to use that beam of energy, which we can direct very accurately, to power a satellite launch vehicle.""I understand that.""Excellent," he said, as though encouraging a student. Then he pushed on. "In any case, the Cyclops itself is a repetitive-pulsed, free-electron laser, which means the computer can tune it continuously to the most energy-efficient wavelength, a crucial feature. It starts with an intense beam of electrons which it accelerates to high velocity, then passes through an array of magnets we call the 'wiggler.' Those magnets are arranged in a line but they alternate in polarity, which causes the electrons passing through to experience rapid variations in magnetic-field strength and direction. What happens is, the alternating magnetic field 'wiggles' the beam of electrons into a wave, causing them to emit a microwave pulse—which is itself then passed back and forth, gaining strength at every pass. Eventually it saturates at a level nearly equal to the power of Grand Coulee Dam, and then—""Maybe you ought to get to the point," Vance said, feeling he was receiving a college lecture. He used to give college lectures, for chrissake, in archaeology. Were they just as tedious? he suddenly wondered."Of course." He pushed on, oblivious. 'The whole operation is controlled by our Fujitsu supercomputer. The hardest part is getting the microwave pulses and the electron pulses to overlap perfectly in the wiggler. That part of the Cyclops, called the coaxial phase shifter, requires delicate fine-tuning. The alignment has to be critically adjusted, the focusing perfect, the cavity length—""Get back to the vehicle. I think I've heard all I need to know about the wonders of the Cyclops.""Very well. The energy is focused, in bursts, from up there." He turned and pointed up the mountain. "That installation is a phased-array microwave transmission system, which delivers it to the spacecraft. To a port located on the sides of the vehicles down there. The port is a special heat-resistant crystal of synthetic diamond. Once inside, the beam is directed downward into the nozzle, where it strikes dry ice and creates plasma, producing thrust. The vehicle is single-stage-to-orbit.""Nothing is burned." Vance had to admit it was a nifty idea. If you could do it.“That's correct. The laser beam creates a shock wave, a burst of superheated gas moving at supersonic velocity out of the nozzle. By pulsing the beam, we form a detonation wave that hits the nozzle chamber and—""So it's really Star Wars in reverse," Vance interjected. "Bates is using all that fancy research in high-powered lasers to put up a satellite instead of shooting one down."“The power is comparable. The superconducting coil we use to store power can pulse as high as twenty-five billion watts. The dry ice that is the 'propellant' is only about three hundred kilograms, a tiny percentage of the vehicle's weight, and since the vehicle is virtually all payload, we should be able to put it into a hundred-nautical-mile orbit in a matter of minutes. The beam energy will be roughly five hundred gigawatts per second and—""I get the picture," Vance interjected, tired of numbers. "But what you're really saying is that this transmission system up here on the mountain is the key to everything. If it goes down, end of show."He was thinking. The terrorists had not destroyed anything, at least not up here. Which probably meant they intended to use it. The prospect chilled him."Okay, let's work backward to where the people are," he continued. "What's down below us here? The power has to get up here somehow.
"Something funny is definitely going on," Mikis continued, to no one in particular. He had already discovered the eccentric American professor with a baseball cap didn't care all that much for small talk. And he had no patience whatsoever for small talk that pointed out the obvious. "I don't like this, but I'll have to put her down. I'm already on my auxiliary tank."
For once Mannheim allowed his thoughts to stray to the concerns of someone else. "There's an airfield at Kythera. You could make it there, if you just touched down here and dropped me off."
"Are you sure you want to do that?" Mikis was gripping the stick, frowning behind his aviator shades. "We can't raise anybody here on the radio, and now there's this mess. Let me take you to Kythera with me. The whole deal looks weird."
"No," Mannheim shouted back. "I have to find out what's happened."
This project is like Sarah, he thought, his estranged daughter coming to mind. I had to do everything I knew how to try to keep her from making the wrong decisions. Then he remembered ruefully that she had gone ahead and made them anyway. But he had been there always, ready to give her advice.
Mikis shrugged, clearly worried, and gave the Jetranger some pedal, circling to search for signs of life. There was nothing. The bleak granite cliffs were barren, and the cool blue of the light surf washed against an empty shoreline. He had not seen this space facility before, but everybody had heard about it. The most impressive sight was, of course, those silver spires down at the other end of the island. Those had to be their vehicles, but nobody was around them now. Puzzled, he examined the huge dormitory-type residence in the middle of the island and the supply buildings, lined along a paved segment connecting the landing pad with the main building, and still saw no one.
"Look, I'm going to just drop you off and then get the hell out of here," he yelled over. He was easing up on the collective, taking her in. "I'll buy petrol on Kythera. I don't see anybody around, and this place gives me the creeps."
"You've done all you need to," Mannheim shouted back. "Something . . ."
His voice trailed off as he finally saw some movement. A figure was coming down the mountain, carrying what looked like an automatic weapon.
"We'd better make this quick."
1:21 P.M.
Vance was moving as fast as he could and watching as the helicopter—now about a thousand yards from the pad—began its final approach.
Friend or foe? With the second arrival in as many hours, the place resembled an airport. He assumed by now they surely had seen the wreckage of the Hind, but they seemed determined to come in anyway.
He watched as the old Bell gingerly began to hover above the landing pad, the pilot dispensing with preliminaries. While it was settling in, he chambered a round in the Uzi, pulled back the gnarled cocking lever on the top, and continued on down the hill at a brisk pace. With any luck he would beat the guys in black. Or maybe they were deliberately keeping a low profile, hoping to lure in the prey. They were also luring him out, he knew, but he had to take the chance.
He was moving quickly, the sharp rocks cutting into his feet, and now only a hundred yards or so remained between him and the approaching helo.
Only then did he first notice he had bumped Bill's new Agusta when he tried to fly the Hind, leaving a bad dent. Now he owed Bates for repairs. Great. He wondered fleetingly if SatCom had terrorist insurance.
There was now an opening in the pad's protective fence, where the Hind had ripped it away, and as the din of the approaching helicopter rang in his ears, he raced across the last clearing, headed for it. But his instincts caused him to look around, and just in time . . .
Approaching on the run down the asphalt road leading from the launch facility were three of the terrorists. He recognized two of them as his earlier assailants, together with a third who looked like he might actually know what he was doing. They must have seen the arriving Jetranger, and now they were coming out to give it a welcome.
The way they were moving, and the AK-47s they were carrying, told him a lot. The chopper's occupants were the good guys.
As the Bell settled in and its door opened, he dropped onto the granite and nestled the metal stock of the Uzi against his cheek. It felt warm from the morning sun, like the touch of a comfortable friend. He flipped the fire control to semiautomatic and caught the approaching goons in the metal sight. Then he gently squeezed the trigger.
The Uzi kicked back, sending a round upward into the morning air. He realized he was out of practice. Next time he would handle it better, but for now he had blown the operation.
The three in black who had been running toward the landing pad dropped onto the asphalt and opened fire, spattering flecks of granite around him as he took cover. Then he looked up to see an elderly man fairly tumble out of the chopper and make a dash for the safety of the SatCom Agusta. He need not have hurried; no one was shooting at him.
As the Jetranger started to lift off, however, the gunmen's focus switched away from Vance, and he realized they had no intention of letting it escape. As it left the pad and banked to gain altitude, the lead terrorist dropped to a prone position on the asphalt and took aim directly at the cockpit, where the pilot was just visible behind the glare of the windscreen. With a range of only fifty yards, Vance realized, taking him out would be easy.
It was. The AK-47 was on full auto, and one burst splintered away the windscreen, exploding it and leaving what remained spattered with blood. The pilot was thrown against the shattered glass, then left hanging halfway through. He never knew what hit him.
The fuselage began to pirouette into a sickening spiral, but the firing continued, as though to kill what was already dead. The gunman's obsessed, Vance thought. He's also emptying his magazine.
Now's the time. Make a move while he's still distracted. These thugs want the old man alive, whoever he is. So why not try and ruin their day, get him before they do.
The Bell continued to autorotate in a series of circles. Then it abruptly nosed straight downward, and a second later it veered toward the side of the cliff abutting the sea. A splintering crash replaced the sound of the engine as the rotors slammed against the granite, shearing away—whereupon the fuselage bounced down the steep wall of the cliff and into the water. In moments the seabed swallowed it up.
In the meantime Vance had reached the landing pad, a few meters away from the old man, who was stumbling distractedly across the asphalt, staring in the direction the chopper had disappeared and so shocked by the sight he seemed not to realize he was walking directly into the hands of the men who had killed the pilot.
Vance wanted to shout, but then he thought better of it. What was the point? The old man clearly was unable to think. He had to be pulled out quickly and with a minimum of risk. No, the best thing to do was lay down a line of covering fire and go for him.
He opened up the Uzi on semiauto and dashed for the Agusta.
1:25p.m.
Wolf Helling hit the ground rolling, bringing up his Kalashnikov, set on automatic. The renegade guard was back to shoot it out, firing from somewhere in the area of the pad.
Good. He was going to trap the fucker. This time he would handle the situation personally; he would not have to depend on a bunch of incompetent East German Stasi burnouts.
He glanced back and saw the two trailing behind him. When the guard had opened fire, they'd dived and stumbled pell-mell for the cover of the storage sheds. They wouldn't be any help, but he'd known that already.
It didn't matter. This was going to be one-on-one. And easy.
The chopper had been lost, which was a shame. Although Ramirez's orders were to seize it when it arrived, that had not been possible. You win some, you lose some.
Amid the gunfire the old man had reached the SatCom helicopter, while the guard was now making a dash for its protection, too, even as he covered himself with another spray from the automatic that the damn fools had let him get.
Fortunately his aim was wild again, probably because he was running, and the rounds sailed by harmlessly. And he was in the open.
Now.
Helling trained his AK-47, long barrel and heavy clip, on him and pulled the trigger. . . .
His clip was empty.
Scheisse! He cursed himself for having used the gun on automatic. At ten pops a second, you could wipe out a 35- round clip before you could sneeze.
Still cursing, he pushed the button releasing the clip and slammed in another. But he was too late; by that time the guard had disappeared behind the SatCom helicopter. The two East Germans were firing randomly and ineffectually from the safety of the storage sheds, holding their weapons around the corners and spraying blindly. Idiots. They were providing cover, but since they had no idea where they were aiming, they were endangering him at least as much as their target.
And now the bastard had reached the cover of the helicopter. He was safe for the moment. But only for the moment.
1:27p.m.
"Don't shoot," Isaac Mannheim shouted as he saw the unshaven, barefoot man roll next to him, an Uzi giving off bursts of rounds.
"Get down," Vance yelled back, then shoved him onto the asphalt beside the blue-and-white Agusta. "You picked a hell of a time to come visiting. There're some new natives, and they're not overly friendly."
"Who are you?" The old man's ancient eyes were brimming with alarm and confusion. "What are you doing here?"
"At the moment I'm trying to keep you alive." Vance checked the clip of the Uzi. There were about seven rounds left. With three hoods out there, all with Kalashnikovs, seven rounds would not go very far.
Was anything usable in the Agusta? he asked himself. He peered through the glass of the cockpit, searching. It looked empty. Except for—
A blast of fire careened by the canopy, and he again yanked Mannheim down onto the asphalt. Then he cautiously raised up enough to recon the situation.
The hoods were all advancing now, scurrying forward from building to building as they gave covering blasts from their automatics. However, the two farthest back did not seem to be overly enthusiastic.
"They're going to kill us, too," Mannheim stammered. "Can you—?"
"Just stay down," Vance interrupted him. "I'm probably the one they want to get rid of. If they'd wanted you dead, believe me, you would be by now."
He opened the door and hurriedly surveyed the cockpit more closely. Yes, he had seen it right . . .
Attached to the back firewall, ready for emergency use, was a rack of smoke grenades, factory fresh, the kind used for signaling in case the helo went down.
He remembered that grenade smoke was designed to cling to the ground rather than rise, and with a burn time between one and two minutes, a good grenade could produce a quarter million cubic feet of HC smoke.
Maybe, he thought, I just got lucky.
He peeled one off the rack and checked it over. Yep, American M-18, which everybody knew was the best. The can was about the size of a Diet Coke, and it was military gray. It even gave the flavor on the side—this one was red, but they also came in yellow and white. Nice to have around if you went down in wooded terrain.
He looked toward the gunmen approaching and made the decision on the spot. With a quick motion he clenched the handle with his right hand and yanked the steel pin with his left. When he looked up again, they had closed the distance, now only about thirty yards. Time for a touchdown.
He drew back and lobbed the can directly at the lead terrorist.
The time delay was one and a half seconds. It landed just in front of the first man, bounced once, and blew—an eruption of red that engulfed him.
Beautiful.
With a quick twist he yanked the rack from the side of the cockpit and began hurling the cans as fast as he could. Finally, he grabbed the startled old professor by the arm, then dropped the last grenade at their feet.
"Time to move the party. There's cover in the rocks up there."
Mannheim stumbled backward as the smoke bomb exploded, and Vance realized he would never make it. He would have to be dragged, or carried. And since dragging was out of the question, there really was only one option.
He bent down and grabbed the old man around the waist, then lifted him over his shoulder. It turned out he was hardly more than skin and bones, maybe a hundred and fifty pounds, tops. After spending the last four days heaving the tillers of the late, lamentedOdysseyII, the load seemed like a feather.
Some more random gunfire exploded behind them as he struggled and stumbled up the rocky slope, but now a dense cloud of red completely obliterated the scene below. The M-18 grenades were still billowing, totally obscuring the landing pad and the roadway.
When they reached the first clump of brush leading up the mountain, he settled Mannheim onto the ground. The old professor was choking from the smoke, totally disoriented, and babbling. Vance clapped a hand over his mouth, then urged him onward.
"No talking. If they find us, we're going to have some really lousy odds."
He removed his hand, and immediately Mannheim started again.
"Whoever you are, I guess I have to thank you for saving my life." He puffed over the stones. "Who are you?"
"I'm a friend of Bill Bates, the man supposedly in charge around here."
"I'm Isaac Mannheim. This project—"
"The godfather." Vance looked him over. "Bill's talked about you. MIT, right?"
“The Cyclops is my—"
"Nice to meet you. Now who in the hell are these thugs?"
"I have no idea."
"Well, we can assume they're not part of Bill's technical support team." He glanced down the hill, toward the drifting cloud of red smoke, then back at the old man. "But if you've been involved in this project, then you must know the layout here."
"I know it very well. But—"
"Good. We're going to have to keep moving, at least till it gets dark, but while we're doing that, I want you to get me up to speed on where things are. Give me the setup. And tell me how many personnel are here and where they are."
Mannheim pointed down the hill, at a point just past the storage sheds. "The people are housed in the Bates Motel, which is over there, beyond that row of buildings."
Vance looked it over. At the moment it seemed deserted.
"Where's the entrance?"
"You can go in directly from the connecting corridor underground, or you can use the front entrance, there."
"What if the entrance topside were locked? Then it would he secure, right?"
"I suppose so." He still seemed disoriented, though he was recovering. "Of course there are fire exits at various places in the underground network, as well as the security lobby over there. And then, the storage sheds can be accessed from below."
"But all of those entry-points can be sealed, right?"
"Yes. In fact, they can be sealed electronically, from Command. The staff controls everything from there."
Vance looked down at the white surf rippled across the blue. "So if somebody wanted to take over this place, that's where they would start, right? Hit that and you're in like a bandit. It's the head office."
“That's correct." Mannheim nodded.
"Good. We know where to focus. Now you're going to tell me how I can get there."
2:18 P.M.
Pierre Armont was forty-six, with gray temples and a body appropriate to an Olympic wrestler. He had full cheeks, a heavy mustache, and suspicious dark eyes that constantly searched his surroundings. It was an innate survival instinct.
He never went out without a tie and a perfect shoeshine, not to mention a crisp military bearing that sat as comfortably on him as a birthright. He prided himself on his ability to instill discipline while at the same time leading his men. Although he liked to command, he wanted to do it from the front, where the action was.
Here in Paris he ran a worldwide business from a gray stone townhouse situated on the Left Bank in an obscure cul-de-sac at the intersection of Saint-Andre des Arts and rue de l'Ancienne Comedie. Fifty meters away from his ivy-covered doorway, the rue de Seine wound down to the river, playing host to one of Paris's finer open-air produce markets, while farther down, rows of small galleries displayed the latest in Neo-Deconstructionist painting and sculpture. An avid amateur chef and art collector, he found the location ideal. From his house, where the French aviator Saint-Exupery once wrote, he could march a few paces, along cobblestones as old as Chartres, and acquire a freshly plucked pheasant, a plump grouse, aromatic black truffles just hours away from the countryside, or an abstract landscape whose paint was scarcely dry. It was the best of all worlds: everything he loved was just meters away, and yet his secretive courtyard provided perfect urban privacy and security, with only the occasional blue-jeaned student from the Academie de Beaux-Arts wandering into his courtyard to sketch. He was rich and he knew how to live well; he also risked his life on a regular basis.
He claimed it made hisfoie grastaste even better.
He worked behind a wide oak desk flanked by a line of state-of-the-art communications equipment, and along one walnut-paneled wall stood rows of files secured inside teak-wood-camouflaged safes. His wide oak desk could have belonged in the office of a travel agent with a very select clientele. However, it served another purpose entirely: it was where he planned operations for ARM.
Pierre Armont headed up the Association of Retired Mercenaries, and he had been busy all day. But he was used to emergencies. What other people called problems, ARM thought of as business.
The Association of Retired Mercenaries was a secretive but loose group of former members of various antiterrorist organizations. The name was an inside joke, because they were far from retired. Although they were not listed in the Paris phone book, governments who needed their services somehow always knew how to find Pierre. ARM took on nasty counterterrorism actions that could not occur officially. They rescued hostages unreported in newspapers, and they had terminated more than a few unpleasant individuals in covert actions that never made the evening news.
At the moment, as he was thinking over the insertion strategy for Andikythera, he was gazing down on his private courtyard and noticing that the honking from the boulevard Saint-Germain indicated that Paris's mid-afternoon traffic had ground to a halt. Again. He had just hung up the scrambled phone, after a thirty-minute conversation with Reggie Hall, the second today. London was on board, so everything was a go. He was looking forward to this one. Somebatardshad mucked with an ARM job. They had to be taken down.
Armont was retired from France's antiterrorist Groupement d'Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale, known as GIGN, ideal experience for his present occupation. Over the years "Gigene" had carried out, among other things, VIP protection in high-threat situations and general antiterrorist ops. Mostly commandos in their twenties and early thirties, Gigene operatives had to pass a grueling series of tests, including firing an H&K MP5 one-handed while swinging through a window in a quick entry called the pendulum technique. Known for their skills in inserting by helicopter, either by rappelling or by parachuting, they could also swim half a mile under water and come out blasting, using their specially loaded Norma ammo.
Armont's particular claim to fame was the invention of a sophisticated slingshot that fired deadly steel balls for a silent kill. He had trained antiterrorist units in a number of France's former colonies, and had secretly provided tactical guidance for the Saudi National Guard when they ejected radical Muslims from the Great Mosque at Mecca.
These days, however, he was a private citizen and ran a simple business. And as with all well-run businesses, the customer was king. If problems arose, they had to be resolved; if a job did not stick, you sent in a repair team. An American member of ARM named Michael Vance, who normally did not participate in the operations end of the business, had turned up at the wrong place at the right time. A Reuters confirmation of the loss of the U.S. communications ship definitely meant some bad action had gone down in the eastern Med. Vance's analysis that it was a preliminary to seizure of the SatCom facility on Andikythera probably was correct. Armont's secretary had spent the day on the phone trying to reach the island, but all commercial communications with the site were down. There was no way that should have happened, even with last night's rough storm.
He had liked Michael Vance the minute he met him, three years earlier. He considered Mike reliable in completing his assignments—be they quick access to a "secure" bank computer file or a paper trail of wire transfers stretching from Miami to Nassau to Geneva to Bogota. Vance's regular missions for ARM, however, were those kinds of transactions, not the street action, and Armont could only hope he could also manage the rougher end of the business.
The organization had checked out the man extensively, as they did all new members, and ARM's computer probably knew as much about him as he did himself. It was an oddball story: son of a famous Penn archaeologist, he had been by turns an archaeologist himself, a yachtsman, and a low-level spook. After he finished his doctorate at Yale and had taught there for two semesters, he had published his dissertation—claiming the famous Palace of Minos in Crete was actually a hallowed necropolis—as a book. It had caused a lot of flap, and to get away for a while, he had taken a vacation in Nassau to do some big-game fishing. Before the trip ended, he had bought an old forty-four-foot Bristol sailboat in need of massive restoration. It was a classic wooden vessel, which meant that no sooner had he finished varnishing the thing from one end to the other than he had to start over again.
But he apparently liked the life. Or maybe he just enjoyed giving the academic snakepit a rest. The computer could not get into his mind. Whatever the reason, however, the sailboat, which had begun as a diversion, soon became something else. By the time he had finished refurbishing her, she was the most beautiful yacht in the Caribbean, and everybody around Nassau wanted a shot at the helm. He had a charter business on his hands.
Then his saga took yet another turn. The Nassau Yacht Club, and the new Hurricane Hole Marina across the bridge on Paradise Island, comprised a yachting fraternity that included a lot of bankers. Nassau, after all, had over three hundred foreign commercial banks, and its "see no evil" approach to regulation and reporting made it a natural haven for drug receipts. With a lot of bankers as clients, before long Vance knew more than any man should about offshore money laundering. He did not like that part of the scene, but the bankers loved his yacht, and they paid cash.
As he once told it, he eventually found out why. At least for one of them. One sunny afternoon the vice president of the European Consolidated Commercial Bank, an attractive blond-haired young Swiss mover known to Vance only as "Werner," was dockingThe Ulyssesat Hurricane Hole, bringing her back from a three-day sail, when the DEA swooped down, flanked by the local Bahamian police. Armed with warrants, they searched the boat and soon uncovered fifty kilos of Colombian export produce. Seems "Werner" had sailedThe Ulyssesto some prearranged point and taken it on, planning to have divers stash the packages in the rudder-trunk air pocket of one of the giant cruise ships that tied up at Nassau's four-berth dock. Vance heard about it when he got a call from the harbormaster advising him that his prized Bristol had just been seized as evidence in a coke bust. He was out of business.
That afternoon Bill Bates had coincidentally flown in on Merv Griffin's Paradise Island commuter airline and come over to Hurricane Hole, wanting to charterThe Ulyssesfor a week of sailing and fishing. Vance had to inform him his favorite Bahamian yacht had just acquired a new owner.
Bates could not believe he had flown into such a screw-up. Vance was having his own problems with disbelief, too, but paying the mortgage was his more immediate concern. The DEA had the boat, but before long he wouldn't have to worry about that any more. That problem, and the boat, would soon belong to the mortgage-holding bank over on Bay Street.
He immediately slapped the DEA with a two-million-dollar lawsuit, just to put on some heat. His lawyer claimed he didn't have a hope in hell.
But two weeks later a Bahamian judge, after lunch with the mortgage-holding banker, summarily ordered the DEA to release the yacht. To Vance's surprise, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration cheerfully complied and turned it over the same afternoon. He immediately dropped the lawsuit, writing off the whole affair as a triumph for truth, justice, and the Bahamian way of banking. Or so it seemed.
Only later did he unearth the Byzantine complexities of what really had happened. The affair had somehow come to the attention of The Company, and there had been a flurry of phone calls to the DEA in New Orleans from Langley, Virginia. A month later, while he was in the States attending a Yale alumni function, he'd found himself talking to two earnest Washington bureaucrats, who congratulated him on beating the system. Huh?
They then described their need for a "financial consultant" in Nassau, somebody who knew the right people. Maybe he would consider taking the job; it could merely be a favor for—they hinted broadly—a favor.
Here was the problem: the CIA desperately needed help in trying to keep track of the cocaine millions being laundered through Nassau's go-go banks. The Company wanted some local assistance getting certain off-the-record audits, from clean bankers who were tired of Nassau being a haven for dirty cash.
He hated drugs and drug money, so he had seen nothing wrong with the idea. He even ended up training some greenhorns out of Langley in the subtle art of tracing wire transfers. Two years later he got his payoff. They formed their own in-house desk to do what he had been doing and retired him. He was, it turned out, too successful.
But the word on such skills got around, and two months later Pierre Armont had approached him about joining ARM. They needed somebody good at tracing hot money, frequently the most reliable trail of a terrorist operation, and everybody close to the business had identified him as the best around.
By that time he had formally incorporated a charter operation in Nassau as Windstalker, Ltd., with three boats, three mortgages, and a big monthly nut. So he had signed on, only later discovering that along with ARM's extra cash came a lot of travel, many responsibilities, and occasional death threats. He took them seriously enough to start carrying his own protection, a chrome-plated 9mm Walther. Armont approved.
Vance had always been well paid. It was expected. Anybody who hired ARM—usually because there was nowhere else left to turn—knew the best did not come cheap. A good two-week op could pull down fifty thousand pounds sterling for every man on the team, which was why the boys drove BMWs and drank twelve-year-old Scotch. But no client ever complained about the price. Or if they did, they didn't complain to Pierre. Payment was always cash, half up front and the rest on delivery. Any client who welshed on the follow-through would be making a very ill-considered career decision.
He pulled the blinds and turned to his desk. Faxes sent via ARM's secure, encrypted system covered the surface. The team was coming together. His secretary Emile, a young Frenchman who came in mornings and worked in the next room, had already booked the necessary flights. By 1800 hours tomorrow everybody would be assembled in Athens and ready to insert.
Armont intended to lead the operation himself . . . unless Vance, as the man on the ground, proved the logical choice. Since he was already in place, always the best location, he would in any case have to be point man.
He had talked the job over with "Hans" in Frankfurt at 1030 hours, just after he had gotten the call from Athens, and together they had picked six operatives. Vance would make seven. He calculated that would be plenty.
"Hans" was thenom de guerreof a former GSG-9, Germany's green-beret-sporting Grenzschutzgruppen 9. GSG-9, headquartered at St. Augustin just outside Bonn, had a nine- million-dollar underground training range that included a communications and intel unit, aircraft mockups, an engineer unit, a weapons unit, an equipment unit, a training unit, and a strike unit. In his fifteen years with GSG-9, Hans had been known to achieve 95 percent accuracy with an H&K MP9 when firing from a moving vehicle or even rappelling down a rope from a hovering chopper. Now retired, he brought to ARM many talents: as well as participating in the on-site op, he usually acted as liaison officer because of his flawless English.
He also knew which old-timers from GSG-9—that was anybody over thirty-five—were looking for an op, and if the
job required some younger talent he used his connections to get current members temporarily released from their units. When needed, he could arrange for special-purpose weapons otherwise "unavailable" or restricted. Once, when a sniper-assault situation called for a hot new IR scope, he borrowed one from the St. Augustin armory overnight, made a drawing, then had it copied in Brussels by noon the next day. He knew where to find ARM field operatives and what shape they were in—which ones had been shot up, broken legs in parachute drops, or gone over the edge with a case of nerves and too much booze.
Best of all, though, he could usually locate a wanted terrorist. GSG-9 was hooked directly into a massive computer in Wiesbaden informally known as the Kommissar. Hans could still tap into the Kommissar, which tracked various world terrorist groups, constantly updating everything known about their methods, their membership, and—most importantly—their movements.
These days he operated a rundownbiergartenin Frankfurt, at least as his cover, and there were suspicions he managed to drink up a lot of its profits. In any case, he was in ARM for the money, and he never pretended otherwise. So when Armont rang him, he was immediately all ears. Never failed.
"Pierre,alio! Comment allez vous?"Even at ten-thirty in the morning Hans could be cheerful. Armont, definitely a night person, never understood how he did it.
"Bien, considering." Armont knew Hans was more comfortable in English than in French, and he hated speaking German. "What're you doing for the next couple of days?"
"Got something?" The German's interest immediately perked up.
"There's a little cleanup . . ."
After he gave him a quick briefing on the situation via their secure phone, Hans was extremely unhappy.
"Dimitri screwed up. It's not our problem."
"I say it's our problem," Pierre replied. "We guarantee our work and you're either in, or you're out. Permanently. Those are the rules."
"All right." Hans sighed. "Can't blame me for not liking it, though."
"So who do you think we need?" Armont asked. Hans knew the people better than he did.
"Well, we definitely should have Reggie," he replied straightaway. "He's the best negotiator we've got, and also he can get us some of the hardware we'll be needing."
The man in question was Reginald Hall. Just under fifty, he was a stocky ex-small-arms instructor, regimental sergeant major, retired, of the SAS, Britain's Special Air Service. In the old days he headed up a unit known in the press as the CRW, Counter Revolutionary Warfare section, called "the special projects blokes" by those on the inside.
He finally quit after successfully leading an assault on the Iranian embassy in London on 5 May 1980—which, to his astonished dismay, was televised live. He'd gotten famous overnight, and after thinking it over for a weekend, he decided the time had come to cash it in. These days he ran a small company that purportedly bought and sold used sports firearms. That was a polite way of saying he dabbled in the international arms trade, though not in a big way. But whenever ABM needed a special piece of equipment, as often as not Reggie found a way to take care of it.
He did not do it for love. Even though he was happily retired down in Dorset, Thomas Hardy country, with a plump Welsh common-law wife, he occasionally slipped away—much to her chagrin—to take on special ops for ARM. Maybe his neighbors thought he had bought their matching Jaguars with his army pension or the sale of used Mausers.
"I'll call him as soon as we hang up. He spent some time in the Emirates or some damn place and claims to speak a little Arabic." He was thinking. "Okay, who else could we use?"
"How about the Flying Dutchmen?" Hans said.
He was referring to the Voorst brothers, Willem and Hugo, both former members of the Royal Dutch Marines' "Whiskey Company." That was the nickname of a special group officially known as the Marine Close Combat Unit. Both bachelors, though never short of women, they lived in Amsterdam and took on any security job that looked like it would pay. They also ran a part-time aircraft charter operation.
"We might need a chopper for the insert. Think they can handle it on such short notice?"
The Voorst brothers would occasionally arrange, through their old connections, for a Dutch military helicopter to get lost in paperwork for a weekend. Whiskey Company was a club, and everybody was going to retire someday. What went around came around. Besides, there was plenty of spare change in it for those who made the arrangements.
"With nobody paying? It'll take some fast talking."
"So far, this thing's being done on spec. We're just making good on a job."
"Don't remind me," Hans groaned. "Don't want to hear it. I think we'd better just rent something in Athens." He paused. "But I also think we ought to take along the Hunter. He'd be the man to handle grenades. He loves those damned things better than his wife."
They were both thinking of Marcel, formerly of the Belgian ESI, Escadron Special d'lntervention. While with ESI, he had fathered their famous four-man units, pairs of two-man teams, and had come up with the idea of carrying a spare magazine on the strong-side wrist to facilitate rapid mag change. ESI was known informally as Diana Unit, and since Diana was the huntress of mythology, Marcel had become known as the Hunter. But not till after he had earned the sobriquet. A former Belgian paratrooper, ex-Angola, he got the nickname after a special op there, when he had saved an entire ARM team by taking out a room of terrorists with three stun grenades, tear gas, and an Uzi—while wearing an antiflash hood called a balaclava plus a gas mask, a little like working under water. Marcel liked the nickname.
"I'll see if I can reach him. The Antwerp number."
"Well, we'll probably need him." Hans paused. "And Vance is already on site. That'll make all the difference."
"He's good. If you can get all the others, I think we'll have what we need."
'Then, let's get started. I'll try to reach everybody and have them in Athens by late tomorrow. Fax me an equipment list and I'll talk that over with Spiros. See what he can get together for us down there and save having to ship it."
"You know,mon cher," Hans had said, "this is no way to start a day."
1:29p.m.
"It was there for the National Security Agency, the NSA," admitted Theodore Brock, his special assistant for national security affairs. The atmosphere in the Oval Office was heating up.
"I'm now well aware of that," the President snapped, not bothering to hide his annoyance. "What I'm not well aware of is who the hell authorized it?"
The Oval Office, in the southeast corner of the White House West Wing, was, in the eyes of many, a small, unimposing prize for all the effort required to take up residence. John Hansen, however, seemed not to notice. He commandeered whatever space he happened to occupy and made it seem an extension of his own spirit. In fact, he rather liked the minimalist quarters, heritage of a time when U.S. presidents had much less weight on their shoulders. From here the wide world opened out. For one thing, the communications here and in the Situation Boom in the basement put the planet at his fingertips. Next to a gigantic push-button multiline telephone was another, highly secure and modernistic, digital voice transmission system that could take him anywhere.
As the old-fashioned Danish grandfather clock—his only personal item in the office—began to chime the half hour, he glanced once more over the crisis summary that Alicia Winston had hastily assembled and had waiting on his desk when he returned from New York. Her office was conveniently just behind one of the three doors that led into the Oval Office. Another led to his personal study, passing through a small kitchen, from which now came the aroma of fresh-brewed Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. The third opened onto a corridor, with the standard six Secret Service people, through which he expected to see his national security adviser appear at 1:45p.m. Then, according to his schedule, he had to try to put all this out of his mind at 2:30, when he was due to host a delegation of troglodytes from the Hill. Nuclear disarmament did not have a lot of friends in Tennessee and Washington State. He was going to have to make some concessions, he knew, but politics was about compromise, always had been.
"Apparently the ship was put into place without authorization," Brock went on. "There was some back-channel request from NSA. They wanted to keep tabs on a space project on an island in the Aegean."
"SatCom. Now we're spying on Americans, is that it?" Hansen leaned back in his high, Kevlar-protected chair and tossed a telling glance toward Morton Davies, his chief of staff, who monitored most of his incoming calls. They both had received an earful on the Cyclops project from his old professor, Isaac Mannheim—who claimed it would demonstrate to the world that America's private sector still had plenty of life left, could stand up to the Europeans and the Japanese when it came to innovation. SatCom's independence from government, at least to Mannheim's way of thinking, was precisely its greatest virtue.
"Well, damn NSA," he continued. "This is an outrage."
He recalled that he'd sent the new director, Al Giramonti, a pointedly worded memo on that very subject. When John Hansen took office, the National Security Agency was still liberally exercising its capacity to monitor every phone call in America from its vast array of listening antennas at Fort Meade. He had resolved to terminate the practice. He thought he had.
"It was just routine surveillance," Brock insisted, squirming. He was in his late fifties, bright, with horn-rimmed glasses and a high forehead. He also was black, and he felt he had more than the usual obligation to make his President look good. "There was a satellite test launching in the works. The whole project has been kept under wraps, and NASA wanted to know what was going on. The National Security Agency had a platform in the area, so it all more or less meshed. There was nothing—"
"And what do the Israelis have to say for themselves?" the President pushed on. "The Hind had their markings."
"They deny they had anything to do with it." He squinted toward Hansen, trying to seem knowledgeable yet uncommitted. Which way was the wind going to blow next? "Even though the helo was plainly ID'd by—"
"That's what they claimed in '67," Hansen fumed, cutting him off, "when they strafed, torpedoed, and napalmed NSA's Liberty, which was clearly in international waters. They were hoping to prolong the Six-Day War long enough to roll into Syria, and they didn't want us to monitor their plans. So they took careful pains to knock out all our SIGINT capability in the region, just happening to kill a dozen seamen in the process. Afterwards the lying fuckers told our embassy in Tel Aviv it was all a mistake and sent flowers. If anybody else in the world had done that, we'd have nuked them."
"Well, at the time the Glover was hit, it wasn't monitoring Israeli SIGINT," Brock noted, adjusting his glasses. "We think they're clean on this one. At least what we have from Fort Meade so far seems to bear that out. They're still running a computer analysis, though, pulling out all the voice and code used by the Israeli Air Force during that time. We didn't have that capability back in 1967. In a few more hours we'll be able to put that question to rest, one way or another."
"Okay, maybe we should go slow till then. So in the meantime, let's take them at their word for a moment and examine the other possibilities." Hansen revolved in his chair and stared out the bulletproof window behind him. The Washington sky was growing overcast. And the clock was running. This whole screw-up would be in tomorrow's Washington Post, garbled, just as sure as the sun was going to come up. CNN had already picked up the BBC's "rumor" and was running it on their "Headline" service, hinting the U.S. intelligence community had been caught with its pants around its ankles, again.
"There's more," Brock said, interrupting his thoughts. "The Iranians have been screaming about a stolen Hind for four days, blaming us, of course. But they've quietly let Mossad know they think it may have strayed into Pakistan, maybe as a diversion, and then ended up heading out for one of the Gulf states, probably Yemen. The Israelis have reason to believe it was delivered to a Yemeni-flagged freighter in the Persian Gulf, then taken through the Suez Canal and into the eastern Med. After that, all contact was lost."
Iran, the President thought. Pakistan. None of it sorted into a picture. Unless . . .
"Incidentally," Morton Davies, Chief of Staff, interjected, "the Israelis also have one other bit of intel that seems to have somehow gotten lost in all of NSA's Cray supercomputers. An Israeli 'fishing trawler' picked up a Mayday they triangulated as coming from somewhere north of Crete. It supposedly claimed—the transmission was a bit garbled—to emanate from the very Hind that had attacked the ship. The broadcast said that terrorists had taken over the SatCom facility on the island of Andikythera. If that's true, it would be the one that the Glover was monitoring."
Hansen stared at him. "Are we supposed to believe any of this? That unknown terrorists are behind this whole thing? That's exactly the kind of disinformation the Israelis have used on us in the past. Besides, it doesn't click. If terrorists did do it, they'd damned sure want the credit. Nobody throws a rock this size through your window unless there's a note attached. So where is it?"
That's when the import of what Davies had said hit him. SatCom. It was going to be the pride of America, a symbol . . . My God, it was a rocket launch facility.
He reached down and touched the blue button on the desk intercom on the right side of his desk.
"Alicia."
"Sir," came back the crisp reply.
"Have NSA send over any recent PHOTOINT they have on the Greek island of Andikythera. By hand. I want it yesterday."
"Yes, sir."
"Ted," he said, turning back to Brock, "somehow this time
I've got an uncomfortable feeling the medium may be the message."
1:49p.m.
"To understand the operation of this facility," Isaac Mannheim was saying, "you need to appreciate the technology we've installed here." He was resting against the trunk of a tree, gazing wearily down the mountain at the sun-baked asphalt of the facility stretching below.
"I've already got a rough idea how it works," Vance replied. He was pondering the quiet down below. "It's the people I want to know more about."
"Well, of course, that's my primary concern as well." The old man shrugged. "But we are on the verge of an experiment that will change the world for all time. That's just as important."
"Not in my book."
"Perhaps. But all the same, I think I should tell you a few technical details about the facility. Since you say you're familiar with its general workings, you probably know that its heart is a twenty-gigawatt laser we call the Cyclops. Using it, we can send a high-energy beam hundreds of miles into space without losing appreciable energy. Our plan is to use that beam of energy, which we can direct very accurately, to power a satellite launch vehicle."
"I understand that."
"Excellent," he said, as though encouraging a student. Then he pushed on. "In any case, the Cyclops itself is a repetitive-pulsed, free-electron laser, which means the computer can tune it continuously to the most energy-efficient wavelength, a crucial feature. It starts with an intense beam of electrons which it accelerates to high velocity, then passes through an array of magnets we call the 'wiggler.' Those magnets are arranged in a line but they alternate in polarity, which causes the electrons passing through to experience rapid variations in magnetic-field strength and direction. What happens is, the alternating magnetic field 'wiggles' the beam of electrons into a wave, causing them to emit a microwave pulse—which is itself then passed back and forth, gaining strength at every pass. Eventually it saturates at a level nearly equal to the power of Grand Coulee Dam, and then—"
"Maybe you ought to get to the point," Vance said, feeling he was receiving a college lecture. He used to give college lectures, for chrissake, in archaeology. Were they just as tedious? he suddenly wondered.
"Of course." He pushed on, oblivious. 'The whole operation is controlled by our Fujitsu supercomputer. The hardest part is getting the microwave pulses and the electron pulses to overlap perfectly in the wiggler. That part of the Cyclops, called the coaxial phase shifter, requires delicate fine-tuning. The alignment has to be critically adjusted, the focusing perfect, the cavity length—"
"Get back to the vehicle. I think I've heard all I need to know about the wonders of the Cyclops."
"Very well. The energy is focused, in bursts, from up there." He turned and pointed up the mountain. "That installation is a phased-array microwave transmission system, which delivers it to the spacecraft. To a port located on the sides of the vehicles down there. The port is a special heat-resistant crystal of synthetic diamond. Once inside, the beam is directed downward into the nozzle, where it strikes dry ice and creates plasma, producing thrust. The vehicle is single-stage-to-orbit."
"Nothing is burned." Vance had to admit it was a nifty idea. If you could do it.
“That's correct. The laser beam creates a shock wave, a burst of superheated gas moving at supersonic velocity out of the nozzle. By pulsing the beam, we form a detonation wave that hits the nozzle chamber and—"
"So it's really Star Wars in reverse," Vance interjected. "Bates is using all that fancy research in high-powered lasers to put up a satellite instead of shooting one down."
“The power is comparable. The superconducting coil we use to store power can pulse as high as twenty-five billion watts. The dry ice that is the 'propellant' is only about three hundred kilograms, a tiny percentage of the vehicle's weight, and since the vehicle is virtually all payload, we should be able to put it into a hundred-nautical-mile orbit in a matter of minutes. The beam energy will be roughly five hundred gigawatts per second and—"
"I get the picture," Vance interjected, tired of numbers. "But what you're really saying is that this transmission system up here on the mountain is the key to everything. If it goes down, end of show."
He was thinking. The terrorists had not destroyed anything, at least not up here. Which probably meant they intended to use it. The prospect chilled him.
"Okay, let's work backward to where the people are," he continued. "What's down below us here? The power has to get up here somehow.