Project Cyclops

  Chapter Three

  7:48 p.m.

  Sitting at Main Control, the central desk facing the large display screen, Cally Andros had just reached a conclusion. She was getting old. Two more weeks to her thirty-fifth birth­day, then a measly five years till the big four-oh. After that she could only look forward to a holding action, fighting sags and crow's-feet. Building dikes to hold back the deluge of time.

  It was depressing.

  She sipped at a cup of black coffee emblazoned with the SatCom logo, the laser eye of the Cyclops, and impatiently drummed her fingers on the workstation keyboard, trying not to be distracted by meditations on mortality. Tonight for the first time they would nin up the superconducting coil all the way, in their most important test yet. The tech crews at the other end of the island predicted it would reach peak power in—she glanced at the huge digital clock on the blue wall next to the screen—twenty-seven minutes. . . .

  What was wrong with her? She had thought that one over a lot and decided the answer was nothing. She had dark Greek eyes, olive skin, and a figure that would stop a clock— a perfect size eight. But it got better. She had the best legs in the world. The absolute very best. If they wouldn't neces­sarily stop a timepiece, they'd sure as heck slowed a lot of traffic over the years.

  No, her problem was opportunity. Whereas on paper this island was every single girl's dream—males trapped here by the carload—all the attractive/interesting men were either too young or too old or too dumb or too married. Moreover, those in the control room—mostly Ph.D.'s in their late twen­ties—saw her only as Dr. C. A. Andros, Director-in-Charge. There seemed to be an unspoken rule around Control that you didn't make a move on the boss lady. Anybody who could run this project had to be treated with the distance befitting authority. Especially since they believed all she really cared about was work.

  Thanks a lot, whoever dreamed that one up.

  The sickest part of all, though, was they were half right. She did not wish herself anywhere else in the world right now, men or no men. She occupied the center of the uni­verse, was poised for the winner-take-all shot she could only have dreamed about five years ago, back when she was still fighting the mindless bureaucrats at NASA. With Project Cy­clops she was running a half-billion-dollar gamble for the last big prize of the twentieth century. If she lived to be a hun­dred, she would never be handed anything this terrific ever again.

  Born Calypso Andropolous thirty-four years ago, daughter of strong-minded Greek farmers, she had learned to believe in herself with a fierce, unshakable conviction. Until now, though, she had never really had the opportunity to test that faith. Until now.

  It had not been an easy journey. After getting her doctor­ate in aerospace engineering from Cal Tech, she had strug­gled up through NASA's Kennedy Center bureaucracy to the position of chief analyst. But she had never achieved more than a desk job. She had wanted more, a lot more. Now, thanks to SatCom, in three days she would have it. Using a fifteen-gigawatt microwave laser nicknamed Cyclops, she was about to put SatCom in the forefront of the private race for space.

  Ironically, the company had built its spaceport barely three hundred kilometers from her birthplace on the island of Naxos. She often thought about life's ironies: sometimes you had to return home to change the future. She barely remem­bered that rugged little island now; the images were faint and overly romantic. Those times dated back to when the junta of right-wing colonels had seized power in Greece. Soon there­after her parents had emigrated; they and their nine-year-old daughter joining a large exodus of freedom-minded Greeks to New York. They had been there only three months when her father died—the hospital said it was pneumonia; she knew it was mourning for Greece and all he had lost. He had loved it more than life. She was afraid, down inside in a place where she didn't visit much anymore, that he loved it more than he had loved her. So along the way she tried to forget all of it, to bury her memories of Greece. And now here she was back again. In New York, Cally Andropolous had, in spite of her­self, thought incessantly of Greece; back here now, all she could think about was New York.

  The strongest recollection was the third floor of a walk-up tenement on Tenth Avenue and Forty-ninth Street, a section of town widely known as Hell's Kitchen—and for good rea­son. The schools were designed to make sociopaths of all those trapped inside; only New York's famous Bronx High School of Science, one of the finest and most competitive public institutions in the nation, offered an escape from their horror.

  Accepted when she was thirteen, Calypso Andropolous graduated third in her class. For her senior science project, she created a solid-fuel rocket, using, as the phrase goes, ordinary household chemicals. And she did it all by herself, with a little help from a skinny French Canadian boy named Georges LeFarge, who lived with his mother in Soho.

  By that time, she knew exactly what she wanted. Her ambition was to be the first woman in space.

  Nobody said it would be easy. But after the rocket—she and Georges had launched it from the Morton Street Pier in Greenwich Village—she felt she was on her way. She had blossomed—in every way, much to her frustration—a lot quicker than Georges did. At age seventeen his idea of sex was still to swap chemical formulas. So she finally gave up on him as a lover and decided to wait till college.

  She chose Cal Tech, selected after turning down accept­ances from half a dozen prestigious universities in the East. By then, Calypso Andropolous had decided she wanted to get as far away from West Forty-ninth Street as possible. And she never wanted to see another eggplant moussaka as long as she lived.

  She also wanted a shorter name, and thus it was that her long Greek surname became merely Andros. That simple change had a liberating effect on her far beyond what she had expected. At last she felt truly American . . . and able to admit to loving nothing better than living off Whoppers and fries. Junk food was, in fact, the thing she missed most here. No, what she missed most was Alan. Still.

  Georges had picked MIT, and she did not see him again until he came to Cal Tech for grad school. By that time she was deeply in love with Alan Harris, who was twenty years her senior. She was discovering things about herself she didn't want to know. Harris was a biochemistry professor, tall and darkly handsome, and she wanted desperately to live with him. She knew he was a notorious womanizer, but that didn't matter. She was looking for a missing father and she didn't care. It was what she wanted.

  When he broke it off, she thought she wanted to die. The only one she had left to turn to was Georges. And they re­started a friendship as platonic as it had been back at Bronx Science, though it was deeper this time. Georges told her to forget about Harris and just concentrate on a first-rate disser­tation.

  It was not easy, but she did. Her project involved com­pressing a big computer program that calculated spacecraft trajectories into a small one that could be operated on a Hew­lett-Packard hand calculator. She then devised a way to cre­ate voice commands that could free up an astronaut's hands while he—soon, she told herself, it would be she—handled other controls.

  After reading every NASA report that NTIS had released on microfiche, she knew no one there had created anything like it. She also figured out that NASA was a hotbed of ca­reerists, all protecting their own turf. The only obstacle to their accepting her new computer program would be the NIH syndrome—Not Invented Here. It turned out she was right, and wrong.

  By happy chance, her dissertation came to the attention of Dr. Edward Olberg, a deputy director of trajectory control at the Kennedy Space Center, who hired her a week later, with a GS rating a full two grades higher than customary. He knew a good thing when he saw it. And now Dr. Cally Andros' computer work was the creation of a NASA employee. End of problem. She still wanted to be in the astronaut program, but she figured she had made a good start.

  She was wrong. It turned out that she was far too valuable in the guidance section to let go. She published a lot of pa­pers, grew very disillusioned, and was on the verge of tel
ling them to stuff it, when . . .

  An executive unknown to her, named William Bates, called one May morning three years ago, said he had read all her papers, and then offered her a job that caused her to postpone her dreams of space flight. He wanted her to head up a private space program. She was, he told her, too good to work for the government. She should be out in the real world, where things happened.

  When she recovered from the shock, she felt an emotion she had not known since her first day at Bronx Science—she was scared. In the business world, the responsibilities were clear-cut and fatal. You were not blowing some anonymous taxpayer's money: it was real cash. Furthermore, your respon­sibilities doubled. Not only did you have to make it work, you had to make a profit. She loved the challenge, but she quaked at the enormous risk.

  Finally she made a deal. Yes, she would give up a sure career for a risky long shot, but on two conditions. First, she got to pick her staff, and second, someday she would get to go into space herself.

  Although he clearly thought the second demand rather farfetched for SatCom, he assented to both. . . .

  "How's it looking, Cally?" Bates was striding into Com­mand, having just emerged from his office at the far end of the cavernous room. Fifties, gray-templed but trim, he wore a trademark open-necked white shirt and blue trousers—a touch of the yachtsman, even ashore. A former Vietnam fighter pilot, he had flown over from the company's head office in Arlington, Virginia two days ago—setting down the company's Gulfstream IV at Athens—to be on hand when the first vehicle, VX-1, went up. As he stalked up, he was his usual crabby self, seemingly never satisfied with anything that was going on.

  She looked him over and stifled the horrible impulse she had sometimes to call him Alan. He was short-tempered, the way Alan Harris was, and he had the same curt voice. Other­wise, though, they were nothing alike. The mind works in strange ways.

  "Cyclops countdown is right on the money, Bill. to the second. Big Benny is humming, and coil temps are nominal. Georges says it's a go for sure this time. We're going to achieve the power levels needed to lase." (They had tried two preliminary power-ups previously, but the supercomputer had shut them down in the last hour of the countdown both times.) "Looks like tonight is the night we get lucky."

  Georges LeFarge had served as her personal assistant throughout the project, even though he formally headed up the computer section. These days he was still slim, almost emaciated, with a scraggly beard he seemed to leave deliber­ately unkempt, just as he had at Cal Tech. Bates had be­stowed on him the title of Director of Computer Systems, which did not sit well with his leftist politics. His conscience wanted him to be a slave to the exploiting capitalists, not one of them. However, he always managed to cash his bonus checks. He had carried on a flirtation with Cally, sending messages back and forth on the Fujitsu's workstations, for the last two years. She had finally taken him up on it; and it was a bust all around. C'est la vie.

  At this moment he was blended into a sea of shirt-sleeved technicians glued to the computer screens in Command Cen­tral, the nerve center of the entire operation. The young Americans all worked in a room slightly smaller than three tennis courts, with rows of light-beige workstations for the staff and three giant master screens that faced out from the far wall. The soft fluorescents, cheerful pale-blue walls spot­ted with posters and the large SatCom laser-eye logo, muted strains of Pink Floyd emanating from speakers somewhere in the corner, and circulated air carrying a hint of the sea—all made the perfect environment for the nineteen young work­ers spaced comfortably apart at the lines of desks this evening shift.

  As they watched, the superconducting coil ratcheted in­creasingly larger bursts of energy into the accelerator, pump­ing it up. At twelve gigawatts the Cyclops should—if all went well—begin to lase.

  The coil, a revolutionary new concept for storing electri­cal energy, was situated deep in the island's core. It was a near-perfect storage system, permitting a huge current of electricity to circulate indefinitely without resistance, ready to produce the massive, microsecond pulses of power. The heart of the system was an electromagnetic induction coil 350 feet in diameter and 50 feet high embedded in a natural cave in the island's bedrock. The coil itself was a new niobium-titanium alloy that became superconducting, storing electric­ity without resistance losses, at the temperature of liquid nitrogen. A vacuum vessel almost like a giant Thermos bottle surrounded the coil and its cryogenic bath.

  The coil fed power into a particle accelerator that drove the complex's centerpiece, the Cyclops—a free-electron laser designed to convert the energy stored in the coil into power­ful pulses of coherent microwaves. The supercomputer would then focus these with the phased-array antennas into the pro­pulsion unit of the space vehicle. That unit contained simple dry ice—the only thing simple about the entire system—which would be converted to plasma by the energy and ex­pand, providing thrust for the vehicle.

  "Cally, we have ten point three gigs," LeFarge announced confidently. He was absently stroking his wisp of beard. "Power is still stable."

  "Good." She watched the readout on the computer screen in front of her as the numbers continued to scroll. If the Cyclops performed the way the engineers were all predict­ing, the world's most powerful laser was about to go critical. A thrill coursed through her.

  The idea was brilliant. By directing the energy to a space vehicle, you kept the power plant for its rockets on the ground. Unlike conventional rockets, the vehicle's weight would be virtually all payload, instead of almost all fuel. It would cut the cost of launching anything by a factor of at least a hundred. . . .

  Now a green oscilloscope next to the computer screens was reading out the buildup, a sine curve slowly increasing in frequency.

  "Eleven point one," Georges announced, barely contain­ing a boyish grin. "We're still nominal."

  Cally glanced at the screen. "Let's keep our fingers crossed. Almost there."

  "By the way," Bates interjected, "assuming everything goes well here tonight and the storm lets up, I've scheduled myself on the Agusta over to Kythera in the morning. A friend of mine was sailing near there, and I'm a little worried. I just tried to reach him on the radio and got no answer. Maybe his radio got swamped, but I want to find out." He was turning to head back to his office. "Now, though, I've got some calls in to Tokyo. So keep me informed on the countdown, and your feelings on the weather."

  More investors, she caught herself thinking. Begging. Which must mean the money's getting tight again. But hang in there just a couple more days, Bill, and we're gonna show the world a thing or two. They'll be begging you to let them invest.

  "I just came in to give you some moral support," Bates continued, pausing, "and to tell you I think you're doing a terrific job."

  "Bullshitting the help again?" She laughed, not quite sure she believed his tone.

  "Why not? It's free." A scowl. "But just keep up the good work." He had extracted a leather tobacco pouch from his blue blazer and begun to fiddle with his heavy briar pipe. She started to ask him to please not smoke here with all the sensi­tive Fujitsu workstations, but then decided they were his workstations. "If this thing flies, literally, I'm going to give you a vulgar stock option. Another one. For putting up with me."

  "How about a bottle of aspirin?" She made a mock face. "I don't have any time to spend the money."

  "I'm going to take care of that, too. After this is over, I'm going to have you kidnapped by a Greek beach boy and taken to some deserted island where there's only one way to pass the time." He frowned back, a wry crinkle passing through the tan at the corner of his eyes. "Twenty years ago I might have tried to do it myself."

  "Still hoping to get me laid?" She gave him her best look of shock, and they both had to laugh. The sexual electricity was there, whether either of them wanted to admit it or not.

  "There's a time and place for everything," he went on, showing he could hint and not hint at the same time. "You're definitely working too h
ard."

  "I can't take all the credit." She knew when to be self-effacing and when to change the subject, fast. "We owe all this to the Bed Sox's oldest living fan."

  By which she meant Isaac Mannheim, the retired MIT professor whose revolutionary propulsion idea had made the whole project possible. In 1969 he had demonstrated his ground-based laser concept to NASA, but they had backed away, claiming they had too much invested in conventional chemical rockets. But he knew it would work, knew it would change the way space was used, so he had taken the idea to entrepreneur William Bates and offered to sign over the pa­tents for a piece of the profits. Bates was impressed. He took him up on the offer, raised the money, and then hired the best aerospace engineer he could find to head up the project. Together they were a perfect team.

  Mannheim, with flowing white hair and tweedy suits, was now in his seventies and lived in retirement in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was due in tomorrow, just in time to watch the first lift-off of a full-scale vehicle. When he arrived in Athens, Cally always dispatched the company Agusta to pick him up. A first-class corporation, she figured, ought to behave like one.

  "If the Cyclops power-up goes off without a hitch tonight, then we should have plenty of good news for him this trip," Bates said. "I'll let you be the one to brief him."

  "Oh, he'll know it all before he gets here. He calls me every day at 1700 hours, our time, to check things out. I could use him to set my watch."

  "Isaac's like the voice of our conscience, always telling us to work harder and better. Well, good for him." He smiled and flicked a gold lighter. The young technicians around the room gave him a disapproving glance, but kept their silence. The boss was the boss.

  Besides, everybody in Command, poised in front of their screens, had other things to worry about.

  8:22 P.M.

  Eric Hamblin, formerly of Sweetwater, Texas, had worked as a guard for SatCom for the past two and a half years and he loved the job. He was twenty-four, a college-dropout casualty of the go-go eighties who got to spend his afternoons hanging out on one of Greece's most beautiful islands. He was tall, thin, and bronzed to perfection. During his weekends on Crete he could almost pass for French as he cruised the Ger­man Frauleins who lined the sands in their string bikinis.

  Tonight he had come on duty at seven o'clock—actually a couple of minutes later than that, since he'd been on the phone to a girl from Dresden to whom he had made some pretty overreaching promises. She wanted to come back to Crete this weekend and do it all over again. He grinned with satisfaction, kiddingly asking himself if he had the stamina.

  He sighed, then strolled on down the east perimeter. The security here at this end of the island was good, as it was everywhere: the tall hurricane fence was topped with razor wire and rigged with electronic alarms. Of course you couldn't see all the security, which meant the place did not feel confining or scary. Which suited him fine. He was wear­ing a .38, but it was mainly for show. He wasn't sure he could hit anything if—God forbid—he should ever have to draw it.

  Besides, the island was surrounded by miles and miles of water, the deep blue Aegean. The whole scene was a fucking hoot, and he gloried in it. Sea, sand, and—on weekends—hot-and-cold running German snatch. Who could ask for more?

  Andikythera was, indeed, a travel poster come to life. Though it still was owned by the Greek shipbuilder Telemachus Viannos, as part of his major investment in the company, Bates had negotiated a long-term lease for SatCom, and by the time the technical staff started arriving, the few Greek shepherds on the island had been comfortably relocated to Paros. Construction began almost immediately after Bates took over, and soon it was almost like one giant Cal Tech laboratory. Everything from Big Benny, SatCom's Fujitsu supercomputer, to the phased-array microwave installation was state of the art. Here SatCom had created a launch facil­ity that was within ten degrees latitude of Cape Canaveral, totally secure from industrial espionage, and perfectly situ­ated to send up a major network of communication satellites.

  Even now, though, the island remained unbelievably picturesque—its sharp white cliffs abutting the deep blue sea, then rising up in craggy granite to a single peak at one end, where the phased-array transmission antennas were now. Its flawless air sparkled in the mornings, then ripened to a rosy hue at sunset. For security and safety, as much as for aesthet­ics, the major high-technology installations had been secured deep in the island's core. Command was at one end, situated behind sealed security doors, and a tunnel from there led down to the power plant, installed a hundred and fifty meters below sea level. Guarding this small piece of paradise had been a snap. . . .

  Hamblin scratched at his neck and moved on through the sand. He despised the shoes they made him wear and wished he could be barefoot, untie his ponytail and let his sandy hair flow free around . . .

  What was that? The east perimeter was totally dark, but he caught a sound that almost could be . . . what? A chop­per approaching? But there were no lights anywhere on the eastern horizon, and the pad was dark. Nobody flew Mr. Bates’ fancy new Agusta 109 Mark II at night. Especially with no lights.

  No mistaking it now, though. A whirlybird was coming in. He could clearly make out the heavy drumbeat of the main rotor.

  8:24 p.m.

  Salim altered the throttles when they were about ten me­ters above the pad, and they started drifting sideways. For a second it looked as though they might ram the Agusta, but then he applied the clutch, stopcocked the engines, and hit the rotor brake. The Hind safely touched down, tires skid­ding. They were in.

  Best of all, there'd been no radar warning alert from the instrument panel. Around them the facility was dark and, as he shut down the engines, deathly quiet. The wheels of the retractable landing gear had barely settled onto the asphalt before the main hatch was open and the men were piling out, black Uzis ready, the first rounds already chambered.

  8:25 p.m.

  Hamblin thought briefly about raising Guard Command at the front desk on his walkie-talkie and inquiring what in hell was going on. But then he knew how they hated false alarms. Particularly when the top brass was busy, like tonight.

  He turned and studied the blinding white glow surround­ing the two launch vehicles, VX-1 and VX-2, down by the superstructure on the western end of the island. They were basking in glory, as though anticipating tonight's power-up of the Cyclops. He automatically glanced at his watch: the big test was scheduled for about twenty minutes from now.

  No, instead of running the risk of looking like a jerk by reporting the expected arrival of SatCom execs he should have known about, he'd check this out himself. Jesus, why didn't anybody tell him anything?

  He mused that security precautions here had been in­tended to guard against infiltration through the fences, not to prevent a chopper from coming in. Guess they figured no­body would be crazy enough to try and sneak in using a helicopter.

  As he moved toward the landing pad, just over a hundred yards farther on down the fence line, he searched his memory for something he might have forgotten. No, he'd glanced over the schedule for the pad this afternoon and nothing was listed. Dr. Andros—what a fox she was, made those plump German broads look like leftover hamburger—always had been good about keeping the schedule up to date. He liked that and counted on it. But then maybe this was some kind of unscheduled situation, connected with the test. Who the hell knew?

  He was about to find out. Fifty yards to go. He could see the chopper now and it was huge, much bigger than anything he'd ever known the company to use. Maybe it was a last-minute delivery. An emergency.

  They had touched down, but still no landing lights. That didn't make any sense. Suddenly nothing made any sense. Another ten seconds, though, and he'd zap them with his big flashlight.

  He flipped the securing strap on his .38 and tested the feel of the grip. Just to be ready.

  He was thirty yards away and he could hear them talking now, though he still did not recognize all the languages. He realiz
ed right away, however, that these clowns weren't connected with SatCom. He'd had an uneasy feeling all along, and now he was sure.

  Were they industrial spies trying to pull a fast one? Maybe sneak in and take some photos?

  He had no time now to radio for help. He was on his own.

  He drew out the .38 and cocked it. Suddenly it felt very heavy. Then in his left hand he rotated the long flashlight till his thumb felt the switch.

  Now.

  He flicked on the light, beaming it through the wire secu­rity fence and catching the side of the chopper—God, it was huge—just in time to see several men stepping down. They were wearing black commando outfits and they most defi­nitely were not anybody from the company.

  "You!" he yelled, his courage growing. "Stop right where you are and identi—"

  One of the intruders whirled in his direction, and before he could finish, he felt a deep burning sensation in his chest that slammed him backward. Next a piercing pain erupted in his neck and his head dropped sideways. The asphalt of the pavement came up, crashing against his nose. He heard the dull thunk of silencers just as the world went forever black.

  8:26 P.M.

  "Pad perimeter secure," Jamal Khan, Salim's intense younger brother said in Farsi, his voice matter-of-fact. He'd just wasted some stranger; no big deal. Then he slipped the Uzi's strap over his shoulder and turned back. Come to think of it, this was the thirteenth man he d killed with an Uzi. Maybe the number would be lucky. . . .

  Ramirez looked out over the facility, confident. Posing as an electronics supplier, he had fully reconnoitered the site two months earlier, meticulously memorizing the location of everything they needed. Once again he reflected on how fortuitous its geometry was. The facility was made to be penetrated from the air.

  Stelios Tritsis, their Greek, was busy scanning the walkie-talkie channels, but he heard no alerts from any of the guards—which meant no more surprises in this remote corner. For reasons of safety, SatCom deliberately had located the heli­copter pad as far as possible from the Cyclops and the launch installation. All staff were engaged down at the other end. This guard had been a loner, and he had paid for his stupidity.

  "Phase two complete," Ramirez announced quietly as he looked back at the Hind. "Now, remember. No heroics. Ev­erybody on semiauto."

  The only obvious security out here was at the entry gate to the chopper pad. After Peretz quickly aborted its alarm by short-circuiting the copper contacts, they moved through single-file. Ramirez stood at the opening, studying each man one last time and hoping he could keep them together as a team.

  So far almost everything had gone according to plan. He had hand-picked, assembled, and trained them four months in Libya, rehearsing them for all the standard antiterrorist techniques that might be used against them—from stun gre­nades to "Thunder Strips"—then afterward had rendez­voused with them in Yemen to pick up the Hind, the other helicopter, and the two packages. He had made cash arrange­ments with enough officials in both countries to ensure that no questions would be asked.

  The most unreliable team member was Salim Khan, to­night's pilot. Ramirez watched him pat a twenty-two-round clip into his Uzi and draw back the gnarled walnut cocking knob on the top as he stepped through the gate. He looked trustworthy, but he really wasn't. Ramirez suspected Salim was too bitter, was too strongly of the opinion life had given him a screwing—which meant he was now devoted to set­tling the score. He liked to live on the edge, push the rules. On the other hand, this mission was all about that, and thus far Ramirez had exploited the Iranian to the hilt. It also meant, however, that he had to be watched: he was a cynical realist who held nothing but contempt for the mili­tant cadres of young firebrands who marched through the streets of Tehran with photos of some ayatollah attached defi­antly to their chest, chanting slogans against the Great Satan . . . while wearing jeans whose back pockets read "Made in U.S.A." Because Salim didn't believe in anything anymore, he was difficult to control. Always dicey.

  Following close behind him, also carrying a black Uzi, was Jamal, his younger brother. Jamal, with crazy eyes and a coal-black beard, was the exact opposite—he only fought for a cause.

  Jamal had come to Lebanon years ago to join Hizballah, a radical organization headquartered in West Beirut and the Bekaa Valley. Since he joined, as many as five hundred Hizballah had been directly involved in terrorist acts in the Middle East and Europe. He believed God wanted him to carry out a jihad, a holy crusade, against the Americans and Zionists who had surrounded and were choking the Muslim peoples. To prove his faith, he had been part of the team that commandeered a Libyan Arab Airlines 727 in flight between Zurich and Tripoli, leading to the longest hijacking in history. The plane had traveled six thousand miles, bouncing from Beirut to Athens, then Rome, again Beirut, and even Tehran before ending on its third stop in Lebanon three days later.

  Miraculously Jamal had walked free. He was a hothead, but he also was a survivor. Jamal prayed five times a day, neither drank nor smoked, and had been one of the explo­sives experts on the U.S. Embassy job in Beirut that killed 218 Marines. He was truly a living contradiction.

  That was fine with Ramirez. He could care less about Hizballah's radical politics. On the other hand, he'd always made good use of them. After Jamal's famous hijacking, Ra­mirez had gone to the Bekaa Valley and found him, and through him Salim—who, by stealing the Hind, had turned out to be much more valuable than his rabid younger brother. All the same, he had problems with them. Iranians sometimes had difficulty discerning the difference between fact and fan­tasy: as with most Muslims, they thought that saying some­thing was so made it happen.

  The tall man striding through after Jamal, nursing a slight limp, was Stelios Tritsis, their only Greek. In 1975, as a young firebrand, he had been a founding member of the famous terrorist organization Epanastaiki Organosi 17 Noemvri. In his heart he was still a radical, dedicated to forcing Greece out of NATO and ending the U.S. military domination of his country. The new American imperialism in the Persian Gulf had only proved he was right all along.

  Because of an incident long ago in his youth—a torture episode at the hands of the infamous Colonels—Stelios's eyes never seemed entirely focused. He had become addicted to the morphine given to relieve the pain and never kicked it. Even so, he was their most lethal marksman, and he consid­ered this operation his final revenge against America and her lackeys. The man didn't care, honestly didn't care, about his share of the money. Even Ramirez had to admire that.

  Following him was Jean-Paul Moreau, head of the famous Action Directe, whose international wing was headquartered in Paris. Jean-Paul was tall, had long flowing blond hair and determined eyes. He also had a famous bullet scar across his cheek from an attempt in the early eighties to assassinate former Justice Minister Alain Peyrefitte with a bomb attached to his car. He merely killed the chauffeur and was wounded by the security guards. But in November 1986 he got his revenge, masterminding the murder of Georges Besse, the chairman of Renault. He wanted nothing more than for Eu­rope to rid herself of Americans and Zionists—toward which end Action Directe had cooperated with the Lebanese Armed Revolutionary Faction on several attacks carried out in France, which was how Ramirez had first met him. In the past Action Directe had financed its operations primarily through bank robberies. After this, Moreau was told, their money problems would be over.

  The next man was Wolf Helling, the lanky, balding leader of Germany's Revolutionare Zellen. Ramirez suspected his real goal in life was to look as Aryan as possible. Politically he was an anarchist—who had, in 1984, bombed a NATO fuel pipeline near Lorch in Baden-Wurttemberg. RZ's official aim was to pressure the U.S. out of Germany through terrorist attacks and to destroy the West German "system" by con­ducting guerrilla terrorism against Zionists and militarists. RZ had long-standing ties to Palestinian terrorist organizations, which was again how Ramirez had met him. How ironic for Helling, just when he had lived to see the Zionist American military be
gin to depart Europe, it had become the de facto ruler of the Middle East. He wanted to teach America one final lesson: the propertied classes of the world could never be secure.

  Following behind him were three beefy former members of East Germany's Stasi—now being sought by authorities in the new unified Germany for torture and other crimes of the past. With few friends left, they had thrown in their lot with RZ. They had always reminded Ramirez of the three mon­keys of folklore: Rudolph Schindler, with his dark sunglasses, could see no evil; Peter Maier remained such a rabid ideo­logue he still could hear no evil (of Communism); and Henes Sommer spoke nothing but evil, against everyone. They were sullen and bitter, but they were perfect goons for auxiliary firepower, or should be. They were men without a country, guns for hire who already had lost everything.

  Dore Peretz, their renegade Israeli, walked through last, closing the wire gate behind him. He had fixed his steady dark eyes on only one outcome: he had come for the money, the money only. No politics or mock-heroics for him. He already had selected a seaside villa in Hadera. Despite his annoying tendency to shoot off his mouth, to make jokes at the wrong time, his contribution would be crucial. Ramirez did not wholly trust him, but he needed his computer and weapons expertise. He asked himself what Peretz would do if the chips were really down. With luck, however, that ques­tion would never have to be answered. Ramirez almost liked him—he was not sure why—and would hate to have to kill the smart-ass fucker. . . .

  They were in. Command lay at one end of SatCom's setup, the two vehicles at the other, and in between was the living quarters—known as the "Bates Motel"—as well as rows of small warehouses that contained supplies for person­nel and equipment maintenance, used for storage but now darkened and locked. As they moved along the walkway, carefully staying out of the circles of light that illuminated the doorways of the warehouses, their black slipovers blended into the Aegean night. The minimal lighting in this area caused him no hesitation: he had thoroughly memorized the site. He knew they would find the control center with the computers just below their present location.

  Now they were approaching the entry-point to Com­mand, the high-security "lobby." Just inside the glass-doored space a uniformed Greek guard occupied a teakwood desk, attentively studying the sports section of an Athens newspa­per.

  They paused in the last shadows before the open space fronting the entryway, giving Stelios Tritsis time to shuck his black pullover. Underneath he was wearing the brown uni­form of a SatCom guard, complete with epaulets and the regulation .38. He also had what, upon casual inspection, looked like a SatCom photo ID.

  While the others waited, holding their breath, he stepped through the glass entry doors, feigning a jaunty pace and flipping the pass impatiently against the leg of his uniform.

  When the SatCom guard looked up, puzzled, and started to challenge him, Tritsis was only five feet away. He sang out a hello in Greek, then reached to scratch an itch in the small of his back. When his hand came away, it was holding a small Glock-17 automatic. The shot was directly in the forehead, a dull thunk, and the guard tumbled backward in his chair, his eyes disbelieving, his .38 still holstered. It took only seconds.

  Without a word the rest of them moved in.

  "What's next?" Ramirez said quietly to Peretz.

  “The code for the doors has to be punched in there—" he pointed. Behind the desk was a computer terminal that re­ported the security status of all the sectors. Its green screen remained blank, flashing no alerts.

  "Disable them," Ramirez ordered, the first test of the Is­raeli's technical skills. In the hours to come, he would prove indispensable. Or so he claimed. "Then deactivate the access code and we ought to be able to just walk in."

  While Jamal was rearranging the guard's body, leaving him slumped over the desk as though asleep, Ramirez locked the entry doors behind them, then stepped behind the desk and dimmed the lobby lights. Finally he slipped off his flight suit and tossed it behind the desk.

  Right on schedule.

  They headed toward Command. He knew that if you con­trol the brain, you are master of the body, and now they had to seize that brain. So far their smooth progress surpassed his hopes. But the next phase was crucial, allowed for no foul-ups. He still feared his ad hoc troops might get trigger-happy and destroy some of the critical equipment; he had even con­sidered making them use blanks, but that was taking too big a risk.

  "The gates of Paradise are about to be opened," Jamal declared through his black beard, his crazed eyes reflecting back the lights on the security door as they changed from red to green and a muted buzzer sounded. "Allah has given this to us."

  Ramirez said nothing, merely straightened the hand-tai­lored cuffs of his charcoal Brioni. Then he stepped back to watch as the door to Command Central slowly began sliding to the left.

  8:39 p.m.

  Cally was thinking about how much she would love a pizza, heavy on the cheese and Italian sausage. No, just heavy on the cholesterol. Why was it that the only things that tasted good were all supposed to be bad for you? She had long ago determined never to let it bother her. Like Scarlett, she'd think about it tomorrow. The heck with it. Everybody needed a secret sin. And that was the worst part of being here on Andikythera. You couldn't just pick up a phone. . . .

  She stared across the cavernous room, her stomach grumbling, and looked at the large overhead screen intended to track the space vehicle after lift-off. Then she glanced around at the rows of desks with computer workstations that lined the floor. It was almost as though she had a small army under her command. All this power, and she still couldn't order up a pizza. What was wrong with this picture? She was so preoc­cupied with her thoughts that she completely failed to notice the new arrivals.

  8:40 p.m.

  As Ramirez took position, he quickly noticed everything. At the far end, beneath the huge master screens, a wide desk commanded the room. And behind it sat a dark-haired woman whose history he had committed to memory. She was the one that counted.

  Odd that a woman should be in charge . . . but then a woman had even been elected president of a major Muslim country. Once. All things were possible, now and then.

  It did not matter to him, not the way he knew it mattered to these two Iranians. He lived in the real world; they lived in a world that did not exist. They, he knew, would say it did not exist yet. Well, that was their problem, not his. . . .

  Gradually, as one technician after another became aware of them standing in the doorway, all activity ceased. Ten men, dressed in black, all armed with Uzis. Their image triggered a reflexive response of fear throughout the room, nurtured by decades of terrorism in the news.

  Ramirez surveyed the room. None of the American technicians had any weapons. As anticipated, he had caught the prey unprepared. Indeed, he had hoped to avoid gunfire. Keep the staff calm. They would be needed.

  "You will continue, please, as you were." His voice sounded over the room, English with only a trace of accent. But that trace of accent was bloodless. The authority with which he spoke let everybody know that the command chain had just changed.

  Cally turned to stare at the intruders, puzzled. They were strangers . . . now the sight of their automatic weapons reg­istered . . . and they were armed. They sure didn't work for SatCom. How the hell did they get through facility security?

  Their leader—she noted that he was wearing a sharp Ital­ian suit, not commando mufti, and he was doing the talking— was scanning the room as though he already owned it. And, in truth, he did. Like the American embassy in Tehran, SatCom had been caught sleeping. But there was no ges­turing of weapons. He seemed to want to maintain normality.

  They're terrorists, her intuition was screaming. But no, her rational mind answered back. It couldn't be true. Terror­ism operated a universe away from Andikythera; it wasn't supposed to touch the lives of anybody outside the hot spots.

  Now their spokesman was strolling down the aisle be­tween the computer terminals, he
aded her way. She figured him for late forties, educated, subject to reason. He seemed rational, or at least businesslike. He could have been a SatCom VP from Arlington dropping by for a surprise inspec­tion. The rest, except for a couple of Arabs with beards, looked like Eurotrash hoods.

  "Miss Andros, I presume," the man said, then laughed. "It is a pleasure to meet you. At last."

  "What are you doing here?" Her disorientation was being rapidly replaced by anger. "This is a restricted area."

  The man smiled . . . almost politely . . . and seemed to ignore the question. "You are absolutely correct. Very rea­sonable, and proper. But please, you and your staff must just continue on and pay no attention to us. Your head-office check-in is scheduled for 2200 hours. You will, of course, report nothing amiss. Which will be true." He bowed lightly. "I'm sure they will want to know how the Cyclops power-up went. In fact, we are all anxious for the answer to that."

  His words echoed off the hard, neon-lit surfaces. Com­mand Central, its pale blue walls notwithstanding, had never seemed more stark.

  "I'd appreciate it very much if you would leave," she said, holding her voice quiet. "This is private property. You are trespassing."

  The man just smiled again and walked over to examine the big screens. "These things have always intrigued me. Like something in the movies. Buck Rogers." He turned back. "Please, don't let my layman's curiosity interfere with your work."

  Bill, Bill. She thought of SatCom's CEO in his office, just beyond the doors at the far end of the room. You've got a radio. And you can see this room on a security monitor. Can't you—

  The door at the far end opened, and there stood William Bates.

  "Who the hell are you?" his voice boomed over the room.

  "My name need not concern you," the terrorist in the suit answered. "Just call me Number One. But I will favor you by returning your question."

  "And I'll give you the same answer, Number One, or whoever the hell you are," Bates replied, not moving. "What­ever you're thinking, there's nothing here to steal. You're wasting your time. What's more, you're trespassing on Ameri­can property. So take those goons with you and get the hell out the same way you came in."

  "American property? Americans seem to think the whole world is their property." He smiled once more. "But let me put your mind at ease. We are not here to steal. And if you cooperate, no one in this room will be harmed."

  Cally looked him over, asking herself whether she be­lieved him. Not for a minute. She suddenly realized this man would kill anyone who got in his way; it was etched into his eyes.

  "Now, Miss Andros . . . you should order your people to proceed with the countdown. My understanding is that the first vehicle is scheduled to be launched in less than sixty-five hours. We certainly want nothing to disrupt your timetable."

  She stared at him more closely, puzzled. If he and these creeps weren't here for blackmail, threatening to destroy the facility, against a payoff, then what could they possibly want?

  "You don't give the orders here." Bates moved toward the man. "I do." He dropped his voice as he passed Cally. "Don't do a goddamn thing." Then he looked up. "You will leave right now, or I'll call my security staff."

  “That would be most unwise. At least two of them would be unable to respond." He nodded toward the door. "You are welcome to check outside. But come, we're all wasting pre­cious time."

  "You son of a bitch. I won't—"

  "Well, well," the man interrupted, "could it be I am luck­ier than I dreamed possible? Could it be that I have the honor to be speaking to none other than William Bates? Have we snared the CEO? No, that would be too much good luck."

  We're screwed, Cally thought. He knows. Now they'll hold Bill for ransom. He's pure gold. Rich and famous.

  "You will kindly take a seat, Mr. Bates," the man went on.

  "The hell I—"

  One of the bearded men carrying an automatic weapon stepped forward and slammed the metal butt into Bates' stomach, sending him staggering backward. He tried to catch his balance, but failed and collapsed ignominiously onto the gray linoleum.

  "Again, we're squandering time," the spokesman, the one in charge, continued calmly. "Where were we? Oh yes, the power-up." He turned around. "Now, Miss Andros, none of us wants that report to be late, do we? It would look bad for everybody."